3 ms·

I used to work in DRAM manufacturing. I believe 100% in bitflips -- we saw them in testing all the time. I also believe the rate at which bitflips are caused

I used to work in DRAM manufacturing. I believe 100% in bitflips -- we saw them in testing all the time. I also believe the rate at which bitflips are caused by gamma rays is absolutely dwarfed by the rate at which bitflips are caused by manufacturing defects. It's really easy to manufacture a weak cell when you're making billions of tiny capacitors at the same time. SRAM might also see lots of bitflips, but that seems even more likely than DRAM to be driven by manufacturing defects, given the greater complexity of the SRAM cell.

trhway 8y ago
>the rate at which bitflips are caused by gamma rays is absolutely dwarfed by the rate at which bitflips are caused by manufacturing defects. back in USSR/Russia gamma rays and aliens were not-an-issue compare to the extremely low reliability of USSR/Russia hardware. The military hardware back then (and some telco hardware built in Russia in 199x (some even for export into Western countries!)) was built as triplicate systems - i.e. primitive quorum/consensus computing. Similarly, as far as i heard back then, due to low reliability of Itanium especially in the beginning, the Itanium based Tandems were also available as "Tridems".
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  Except for the case in the USSR when gamma rays were an issue at a train depot computer system due to radioactive cows from near Chernobyl: http://www.jakepoz.com/debugging-behind-the-iron-curtain/ http://www.jakepoz.com/debugging-behind-the-iron-curtain/