10 ms·
There was at least a long period of time until recently that Intel parts didn't even tape out ECC for consumer designs. That's what I meant by masks, their pro
by monocasa 5y ago
There was at least a long period of time until recently that Intel parts didn't even tape out ECC for consumer designs. That's what I meant by masks, their product differentiation for an individual chip in that case is all the way in the mask. See how here all of the chips Intel enables ECC on are Xeons or the occasional Atom intended for servers? https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/search/featurefilter.html?productType=873&0_StatusCodeText1=3,4&0_ECCMemory=True https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/search/featurefi... The only question there is if they still have it taped out on some other masks, but universally disable it on those chips as a later product decision. There's a tiny chance that's the case so that they can make more real time product decisions rather than having to wait out the multi year process to tape out new chips.
And lasers were used at least very very recently at Intel.
- rasz 5y agoLook at E3-1245 V3, then 4770k, and finally 4770. Can you spot a difference? Its ECC and TSX-NI. Same die.
- monocasa 5y agoRight, so when I said ECC _might_ not even be taped out, it obviously depends heavily on the die. Sometimes they repackage Xeon dies as extreme high end consumer parts, but it's very rare and doesn't apply to the general case (and your examples are almost a decade old at this point).