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Still wild to me we lost ECC RAM. It used to be standard in PCs. Does Apple hardware come with ECC RAM? If anyone could make it make sense as a business, it's
by NelsonMinar 4y ago
Still wild to me we lost ECC RAM. It used to be standard in PCs.
Does Apple hardware come with ECC RAM? If anyone could make it make sense as a business, it's them.
- pram 4y agoThe Xeon based Macs had ECC of course. None of the ARM ones do (yet)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MBCook 4y agoWhen was it standard? It’s been the high-end extra thing for as long as I can remember.
- Felger 4y agoI can remember 486 Motherboard in Packard Bell (quite the entry brand...) systems frequently used 36 bits ECC FP SIMMs. Printers and plotters from this era used ECC modules most of the time. But by the end of the century, they were replaced by unbuffered, unregistered 16/32/64 bits modules. Every mid range server still use ECC. Entry HPE Servers use ECC UREG (unregistered, 9 chips) modules, while mid range and more use ECC REG modules (9 chip + interface controller onboard). Ironically, UREG module are more expensive than ECC REG. Also, most workstations used ECC modules. Less frequently since 4-5 years.
- MisterTea 4y agoI know the Pentium Pro/2/3 chipsets and motherboards all(?) supported it. Unsure of the Pentium 1 as the 430TX on my Tyan Tomcat IV doesn't, and that is a dual processor board. 486 and earlier likely depended on the chipset as there were many. At work I have two working slot 1 PIII 800's each with 1GB ECC (4x 256MB DIMMS) on a regular Asus board (doing nothing but waiting to go home with me one day). The board reports the RAM is in fact ECC and that it is enabled.
- NelsonMinar 4y agoI was thinking of 386 era computers and strictly speaking it was just parity RAM, not ECC. Which often led to annoyances when a single parity error would cause your whole computer to halt. Wikipedia says "By the mid-1990s, most DRAM had dropped parity checking as manufacturers felt confident that it was no longer necessary.". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_parity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_parity I'd love to read a technical deep dive on RAM reliability over time. You'd think with increasing memory cell density and overall larger RAM the number of absolute errors on a desktop computer would be going up over time.
- MBCook 4y agoAh. I was introduced to PCs during the late 386 era, so that would explain it. I do remember parity errors. Thanks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- veidr 4y agoApple does not make any Macs with ECC RAM any more. This was the reason I always used Mac Pro machines, and at the end, iMac Pro: those machines had ECC RAM, and incidentally always seemed more stable over months and years than the MacBook Pros I had, which didn’t. (Of course, there are a lot of reasons why a laptop might crash or malfunction an order of magnitude more than a desktop machine. The benefits of ECC RAM are really hard to catch definitively in the wild. We know they exist though, so I’m in the “it’s insane not to use ECC RAM for any use case that persisting data and then reading it back later” camp.)