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I really wish we’d just get in-band ECC on normal consumer platforms. That way we’d need no special DIMMs, in applications where ECC was desired it could be ena
by bpye 3y ago
I really wish we’d just get in-band ECC on normal consumer platforms. That way we’d need no special DIMMs, in applications where ECC was desired it could be enabled and the capacity penalty would be paid, in other applications it could be disabled and no capacity would be lost.
- gabereiser 3y agoI like this idea. 64gb of ram non-ecc, 48gb in ecc. Dynamic, succinct, and enables more supply chain cross over for not having two (three?) separate DIMM types.
- Aurornis 3y agoHaving physical memory segments be different logical sizes at runtime depending on the ECC setting does not sound fun. Having your system’s available memory fluctuate up and down based on how many segments are currently set to ECC also doesn’t sound fun. Having developers manually turn ECC off for regions where it’s unimportant sounds like a lot of complexity for a relatively rare use case. There is in-band ECC in some newer Intel designs, but it’s all or nothing. Adding extremely complexity to memory management to selectively disable it sounds like a lot to ask.
- gabereiser 3y agoI believe it would just be a kernel setting. Developers would just see full capacity or ecc-capacity, they wouldn’t care much why.
- Aurornis 3y agoIt’s implemented as a BIOS setting where it’s supported. But the parent comment was suggesting that it be on or off depending on the memory segment, which is a completely different problem.
- saltcured 3y agoI don't see "segment" in the earlier post at all. I think your reading depends on thinking "application" means "process", while another reading would be that an application is a particular deployed system, where this setting can be altered e.g. at the BIOS level.
- gabereiser 3y agolikewise, I assumed it was a hard system-wide setting and not application specific.
- bpye 3y agoSorry yes I did mean application as in a deployed system rather than a specific process.
- jakobson14 3y agoTalk to intel. On AMD ECC support is pretty much standard on every chip they make, and always has been. Even my shitty 4-core phenom from over ten years ago on an el-cheapo motherboard supported swapping it's regular DIMMs for ECC ones. You're never going to get ECC "for free" but it would be totally possible for everyone to pay the cost once and just move to ECC-only for everything from now on. Except intel, the company that brought software-locked hardware features to x86, love to price-differentiate.