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Perhaps we'll finally start being able to get mobile devices with ECC memory, now that its useful for preventing the nominal owners of devices from having actua
by nullc 10y ago
Perhaps we'll finally start being able to get mobile devices with ECC memory, now that its useful for preventing the nominal owners of devices from having actual control or visibility into their operation.
- igravious 10y agoThat would be very nice indeed. And on a laptop that comes in less than €2k also would be doubly nice.
- rasz_pl 10y agoDont count on laptops, Intel treats ECC as one of the market segmentation features. AMD on the other hand supports ECC on everything, even the lowest budget cpu models.
- Andys 10y agoThere is now a Mobile Xeon CPU, which is available in the Lenovo P50/P70 series, with ECC RAM.
- igravious 10y agoI priced it there, costs upwards of ~€3k
- rlpb 10y agoIf the choice is between insecurity and ECC, market segmentation based on ECC may no longer be possible.
- dboreham 10y agoAnother choice is : memory chips that work.
- gsnedders 10y agoAs far as I'm aware, AMD don't support ECC on many APUs, which nowadays account for the majority of CPUs they sell.
- tmzt 10y agoI was trying to figure out the roadmap, pricing, and feature sets for their APUs. I gave up. I'm looking for a low-end APU with a fair amount of system ram (not dedicated vram) for use as a graphics coproccessor on a relatively slow bus. I'm finding high end CPUs with integrated graphics, and low-end CPU only chips. The only thing close to what I'm looking for is on an older process.
- paulmd 10y agoI think you might be looking for Socket AM1, like the Athlon 5350. If you need ECC, get the Asus AM1M-A. None of the boards have more than 2 RAM slots though. If you have a Microcenter nearby, you can get a $40 discount on an AM1 bundle deal. The motherboard and CPU end up being about $40 total. It makes a decent little Unix server. The Intel J1800/J1900/J2900 boards are pretty cheap too but no ECC. Also, Asrock just announced its Goldmont-based J4205 board.
- tmzt 10y agoThanks, it's for an embedded development project so the low total price is very helpful.
- paulmd 10y agoMost APUs support it. Many motherboard manufacturers choose not to expose this capability and a few sockets don't even expose it. Kabini supports it. Construction cores support it. FM2+ does not, but the mobile socket version FP3 does.
- dancek 10y agoTouché.
- ryuuchin 10y agoDoes ECC memory make this harder to pull off? I was under the impression that ECC memory does not mitigate rowhammer although it may make it harder[1]. > Tests show that simple ECC solutions, providing single-error correction and double-error detection (SECDED) capabilities, are not able to correct or detect all observed disturbance errors because some of them include more than two flipped bits per memory word. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer#Mitigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer#Mitigation
- Natanael_L 10y agoIt reduces the occurrences of successful bitflips with a big margin. So it is helpful, but not perfect.
- jerf 10y agoIf you want to leverage Rowhammer to get ECC everywhere, don't root phones; figure out how to crack into a media stream you shouldn't have access to, like a Netflix stream or a Bluray rip. Which may very well incorporate rooting phones. But that'll get the industry forces screaming for ECC everywhere (and per other threads, whatever else it takes to make hardware proof against Rowhammer) far more than merely rooting, and they'll scream for it for all hardware. No point in protecting Blurays if the cheapest hardware is what rips the most easily. Proofing hardware against Rowhammer is still necessary even if it does happen to help DRM. It is not possible to write secure code of any kind in an environment where Rowhammer can be performed. The casual dismissiveness the industry seems to have about this problem really surprises me... per the article we all just read, this at least threatens to become a Heartbleed-class problem at some point, but will make Heartbleed remediation look like a walk in the park by comparison. Hardware diversity generally protects us, but there are places where there isn't as much diversity, such as phones, where this could become a massive problem.
- Natanael_L 10y agoHey, doesn't blu-ray players have web access? Rowhammer via Javascript is already a thing. See where I'm going with this?