4 ms·
Why is ECC sought after on the desktop?
by k_lander 9y ago
Why is ECC sought after on the desktop?
- bitL 9y agoSome people run >32GB RAM with long uptime and there the chance of a random bit-flip might not be acceptable. Imagine working on some Deep Learning model, training it for 30 consecutive days and then hitting a memory bug during computation.
- Synaesthesia 9y agoNot your everyday requirement, also ML is somewhat tolerant to small faults like that.
- bitL 9y agoDepends. If a bit is flipped in a dataset you are likely fine, if in code your computation might crash. If you use enterprise-grade software like ZFS filesystem that keeps a lot in memory, it's much better to have ECC and accept a bit slower memory access for a bit better protection.
- OoooooooO 9y agoZFS without ECC is pretty useless ...
- michaelmrose 9y agoZFS is no more vulnerable to corruption when running without ECC than any other file system. The developers of zfs suggest ECC because ECC is a worthwhile thing for those who care about their data. You should stop spreading misinformation.
- Retr0spectrum 9y agoRowhammer protection, for one thing.
- onli 9y agoECC does not protect against Rowhammer attacks.
- Retr0spectrum 9y agoIt seems you are correct, but surely it must make a practical attack much harder?
- onli 9y agoI'm not so sure. But it's not an area I know much about. But practically thinking: If you try to change the memory content of an area, that means you have software running on the target machine. Does it matter much then whether you need more time because of ECC?