3 ms·

What laptop/portable device has ECC memory and why do you need it?

• zamalek 2y ago
  Depending on who you ask, Intel successfully conned the industry into believing that ECC isn't required for consumers - so that they could put a price on it. If you care about what you are doing in your PC in theory you should really care about it. You won't find it in consumer devices, though. AMD CPUs support it, but good luck finding a mobo that does.
  • snvzz 2y ago
    Many motherboards claim support. The main issue is documentation. It isn't clear which ram to buy. Reviewers are also to blame... nobody tests with ECC. Not even the review sites that are focusing in professional use. For the memory corruption aware person, life is currently hard.
  • zahlman 2y ago
    I don't think that was the question. Objectively speaking, what advantages does it bring? Objectively speaking, what consumer laptops offer it? Subjectively, given that it's rarely supported by consumer laptops, why would it be justified to dismiss a device without it as a "toy"?
    • zamalek 2y ago
      > why would it be justified to dismiss a device without it as a "toy"? Which is exactly why I italicized in theory.
    • kevincox 2y ago
      > Objectively speaking, what advantages does it bring? Lack of random crashes due to memory corruption. Lack of data corruption due to undetected memory corruption that has been written to disk or the network. Yes, these numbers for any individual user are quite small. But the definitely happen. If you have crash metrics for a client application you can see a very significant difference between ECC and non-ECC users. Some of this can be explained by general hardware quality but it is undeniable that having memory that randomly has errors is a real problem with adverse effects.