The people designing RAM and motherboards and the people working at JEDEC will of course know more about these things than almost everyone who reads hacker news. But I'd still prefer not to just blindly trust that they do the best things for us and have some documentation available.
Is anyone here good at navigating patent records? I would be surprised if there isn't something to be revealed in a patent but I don't know how to find it.
How do YOU propose doing this when most computer "experts" have never used ECC RAM and when it's only available in high end specialist systems that aren't on sale in regular computer stores?
I think my knowledge of the topic is pretty good but I learned from this discussion that almost all AMD CPUs support ECC RAM and you apparently just need a motherboard to match. When accompanying people who were buying "gamer" PCs (after they rejected my recommendation for a second hand workstation grade computer with ECC RAM) I never witnessed store staff saying "hey you could get a motherboard with ECC support".
It's simply none of my business whether or not someone does the homework to understand what kind of RAM they should buy. I bothered to inform myself; they can, too.
Next up. CPUs that will spit out the wrong calculations 1/1M times. You’ll have to pay more for the enterprise version to get uncorrupted processing. The spare traces cost 5 cents, but we can charge 20% more for the privilege instead.
Just because you can allow it, doesn’t mean you should. I don’t want to live in a world where you need a PhD to avoid being scammed by increasingly sophisticated ploys. Data isn’t free anymore and the right questions are becoming harder to ask.
It's none of their business whether or not others choose to use ECC. It's absolutely his business whether or not authorities force them to use ECC RAM or else.
The original IBM PC/XT had parity RAM. In the early PC/XT and PC/AT clones you had banks of 9 DIP sockets for memory chips with the 9th being for parity.
The DDR4 ECC RAM has 72 bits total and 64bits of data which means the same 9/8 ratio of data storage to usable data as the original PC/XT.
The Z80 and 6502 based computers in the 80s typically didn't have parity RAM. The Amiga and Macintosh were higher performance systems in the 80s which also didn't have parity RAM.
We could and should have gone straight from parity RAM to ECC RAM for everything.
BTRFS has checksums on all metadata. It isn't designed to cope with bad RAM but has been shown to be somewhat resistant to it to the degree that BTRFS developers can recognise symptoms in problem reports.
Whether a filesystem could be designed to operate in the face of random memory changes would be an interesting computer science research topic. But for getting working systems having RAM just not fail is a better option.
No-one ever proposed making non-ECC RAM illegal, that's a straw-man.
Restricting risky items is standard practice for all governments. All the "use by" dates on food etc are from government regulation. The current experiments with "raw milk" shows that you can get away with flouting food safety regulations and not have immediate problems.
I respect the time of my readers by accurately presenting my claims. It seems that everyone other than you was able to understand "My experience of memory errors".
I have a HP Z640 that only has 3/4 DIMM slots working. Reseating the CPU didn't help and the same CPU works perfectly in another Z640. I never found out the cause. It was sold as "unknown condition for parts" so $50 for a server that works perfectly apart from one DIMM slot is still a good deal.
Is anyone here good at navigating patent records? I would be surprised if there isn't something to be revealed in a patent but I don't know how to find it.