There are many techniques that can be used to eliminate soft errors. These techniques used to be quite common in the '60s and '70s when hardware was much less r

There are many techniques that can be used to eliminate soft errors. These techniques used to be quite common in the '60s and '70s when hardware was much less reliable overall.[1] There were companies like Tandem Computers [2] whose rai·son d'être was fault tolerance. But then two things happened. First, chips themselves became much more reliable. Second, semiconductor vendors began adding fault tolerance to standard ICs. E.g. Intel adds ECC to their internal caches. So, IIRC from reading Dark Pools[3], cheap Linux boxes became so reliable that upstart stock exchanges were just running on random white box server hardware located in people's offices. No need to buy million dollar computers any more. No need to buy the highly fault tolerant Itanium. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tolerant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tolerant [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Patterson_%28author%29#Dark_Pools http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Patterson_%28author%29#Da...