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Why don’t PCs use error correcting RAM? “Because Intel,” says Linus
- dijit 6y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25622322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25622322
- mikece 6y agoI absolutely love that Linus speaks his mind. Candor and telling it honestly is getting rarer...
- happytoexplain 6y agoUnfortunately, "candor and telling it honestly" is frequently code for "I want to be hostile toward people I don't like, but I don't want to experience social consequences for it", so there's a lot of noise in the interpretation of this space.
- slingnow 6y agoDo you have any evidence for this claim?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- enragedcacti 6y agoI'm not sure what 'evidence' would be satisfying to you for something like this, but maybe something about the man himself will help you understand what he means? https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/after-years-of-abusive-e-mails-the-creator-of-linux-steps-aside https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/after-years-of-ab... tl;dr for the article: “Please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place” - Linus Torvalds, former "Candid" speaker
- kodah 6y agoLinus has since apologized for his words and actions against people, worked to correct them, and has been maintaining a pretty good track record so far. Your generalization falls short of reality unfortunately. It is possible to use candor and "tell it like it is" without degrading people, which is exactly what you see here.
- loeg 6y agoI agree it's often a problem. Happily, in this instance, Linus's criticisms are on the mark and not directed at an individual.
- ahelwer 6y agoInteresting. Looking online, it seems AMD's desktop-grade Ryzen line supports ECC, although motherboard ECC support is still somewhat rare. Yet another reason to prefer AMD these days I guess. This reddit comment has more info on Ryzen ECC support: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ggmyyg/an_overview_of_ecc_memory_on_ryzen/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ggmyyg/an_overview_of_...
- spicybright 6y agoWhile I don't think he should be flipping the bird, his technical arguments are absolutely spot on. An aside question for readers: How often does RAM error, and is it a significant problem in practice? I don't have any direct experience with this (that I could tell) using consumer computers for the past 15-odd years of programming.
- ahelwer 6y agoThat photo is from him saying "fuck you" to NVIDIA back in 2012: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/linus-torvalds-says-f-k-you-to-nvidia/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/linus... FTA: "Bit flips can happen for many reasons, beginning with cosmic-ray impact or simple hardware failure. A large-scale study[0] of Google servers found that roughly 32 percent of all servers (and 8 percent of all DIMMs) in Google's fleet experience at least one memory error per year. But the vast majority of these are single-bit errors—and since Google is using server CPUs and ECC RAM, this means the machines in question keep right on trucking." [0] http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf
- monocasa 6y agoSomething that doesn't get said enough is that Google had a habit at the time of buying RAM chips that had failed manufacturer QA, stuck them on DIMMs themselves, and revalidated those DIMMs. They were really leaning into the whole "embrace failures if they're going to happen anyway and you can get cheaper servers out of it". So those numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt.
- mywittyname 6y agoEven still, a one-third of a memory error per year is a rate that I'm totally comfortable with.
- thinkmassive 6y agoAlso FTA: "ECC RAM ... can generally stop Rowhammer attacks—in which rapidly flipping bits in one area of RAM cause bits in an adjacent area to change."
- epx 6y agoGiven the current RAM and disk sizes, and how much we put trust on computers, every cell phone or computer should use ECC RAM and checksummed filesystems these days.
- tyingq 6y agoThe density/process size of the RAM would seem to drive that as well. A cosmic ray, for example, has a better chance of flipping a bit on a denser collection of transistors. Assuming the die size is the same, due to the total amount of RAM increasing, as you mention.
- Bluecobra 6y agoMakes me think how many blue screens/crashes I've experienced over the years on my desktop could have been avoided by ECC. On a global level, think of all of that time & productivity lost due to an arbitrary policy/penny pinching.
- spicybright 6y agoCapitalism drives tech forward, and then very quickly stifles it once it's proven you can sell it. It's sad thinking of where we could be today if mega-corps had less incentive to do this. Edit: to the down voter, please explain why you think my opinion is wrong?
- tyingq 6y agoIf I understand it right, all of the AMD Ryzen processors support ECC, provided the motherboard/chipset do as well. Which somewhat supports Linus' opinion.
- wil421 6y agoThey don’t officially support it but they don’t disable it on consumer chips like intel does. It’s supposed to work but if you have any problems with it you can’t go back to AMD and complain. IMHO that’s not really good enough, if ECC is going to protect you they need to officially support it. It sounds like not officially supporting ECC is a CYA move for when it doesn’t work.
- mywittyname 6y agoThe market killed ECC for consumers. It used to be widely available to desktop class hardware (I used to have some), but it was slower and more expensive than non-ECC RAM. None of the marketing-types made a good case for why normal people should pay more money for less-performant hardware, so the market disappeared. Even the security issues only meaningfully impact servers. People like Linus can buy server-class hardware if ECC is so important to them.
- tyingq 6y agoOld Sunblade desktops have a jumper switch where you can use either ECC or non-ECC ram.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago> so the market disappeared. So your claim is that it has nothing to do with Intel's product segmentation strategy?
- karmakaze 6y agoThe 'market' was influenced by two things. 1. Intel using ECC to segment consumer/server offerings. 2. Even when AMD supported ECC (officially or unofficially) on consumer products, consumers voted with their wallets with a mix of ignorance. ECC ram should be more expensive as you're paying for more bits, and marginally slower as you're comparing stored with computed. If consumers don't value their data (they say they do but don't act accordingly), bit errors is what we get. I do my job on a company laptop, if it were my own company I'd use an AMD desktop with ECC.