2 ms·
What about ECC for the logic circuits of CPUs? Like, some form of redundancy that enables detection and correction of logical errors caused by some kind of malf
by nextaccountic 2y ago
What about ECC for the logic circuits of CPUs? Like, some form of redundancy that enables detection and correction of logical errors caused by some kind of malfunctioning in circuits that do computation (perhaps caused by cosmic rays or something)
- adrian_b 2y agoThe makers of server CPUs have always claimed that those have additional "RAS" (Reliability, availability and serviceability) features in comparison with consumer CPUs. Nevertheless, I have never seen such a vendor giving a non-fuzzy description of those features. Moreover, after the sinking of Itanium, except for IBM the other server CPU makers use CPU cores that are also designed for consumer applications, so at most the server CPUs may have additional redundancy in some execution units (for validating the results) that is disabled in the consumer variants, to reduce the power consumption. However if that were true I do not see why the CPU vendors would not brag about it, to justify the premium price that is requested for the server CPUs. For the applications that need very high reliability, it appears that in most cases it is preferable to use multiple CPUs operating in lock-step, which can be compared, ensuring that errors will be detected regardless in which part of the CPU they appear, instead of attempting to use a single CPU that is extremely fault-tolerant by using specially designed redundant execution units (because errors can appear anywhere, including on interconnections and buffers).