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I get the sentiment around this, especially as there's no way to reasonably get ram that isn't susceptible to these failure patterns. But, with that said, memo
by verall 8y ago
I get the sentiment around this, especially as there's no way to reasonably get ram that isn't susceptible to these failure patterns.
But, with that said, memory is extremely low margin (dram is a commodity market) and is priced part based on yield. Manufacturers adding rounds of QA likely to fail many chips, pushing yield down and promoting process changes is extremely expensive. I also want to pressure manufacturers to make more reliable, correct product, but that has a cost. Even if a law was passed that all commodity dram had to be RH-hard, price would jump. In any other scenario, RH-hard dram would be a speciality need and priced accordingly.
And even ECC dram has tolerances and potential for silent corrupting failure. Most aren't perfect.
- userbinator 8y agoespecially as there's no way to reasonably get ram that isn't susceptible to these failure patterns. If I remember correctly from the original Rowhammer paper, anything from ~2009 or earlier is not affected. Price for RAM was not particularly high in those times either, and I'd be willing to pay the same (inflation-adjusted) amount today if it meant I didn't have to worry about these problems. In any other scenario, RH-hard dram would be a speciality need and priced accordingly. It shouldn't be, because the access pattern could show up incidentally in other ways and cause problems like silent corruption.