4 ms·
Speaking as a hardware engineer, no one should ever buy non ECC-RAM. Smartphones and laptops should also come with ECC-RAM. It is that important for reliabili
by mozumder 10y ago
Speaking as a hardware engineer, no one should ever buy non ECC-RAM.
Smartphones and laptops should also come with ECC-RAM.
It is that important for reliability.
- dogma1138 10y agoIf it is that important to reliability why isn't all software failing around us? It's important but it's not that important outside of specific applications/use cases.
- mozumder 10y ago> If it is that important to reliability why isn't all software failing around us? They do fail. Lots and lots of times. And it gets worse over time, as chips degrade due to hot-electron effects or electromigration.
- dogma1138 10y agoYou forgot random bits flipping due to cosmic radiation.
- rixed 10y agoSpeaking with data regarding failure rates and its actual impact would be even more appreciated.
- mozumder 10y agoYah that's not going to happen. Lot of that is Fab trade secret. You'll have to use your best guess or intuition on this.
- rixed 10y agoMy personal experience tells me that a bit flip is very unlikely to cause a system to fail before a bug or normal termination turns it down. My intuition tells me this is due to shorter and shorter individual program life span due to expansion of client/server architecture, higher frequency of bugs due to expansion of untyped/unstructured data, and the fact that most data manipulated by a program is not initialized/used anyway. Only in very big clusters have I ever heard of memory failure being noticable, but even there I've never seen memory corruption cited in a post mortem. Having to deal with bugs and other hardware defects forces one to work around lack of data integrity anyway.