Comment on 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

• tal@lemmy.today ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The problem is that ECC is used to permit price discrimination between server (less price sensitive) and PC (more price sensitive) users. Like, there’s a significant price difference, more than cost-of-manufacture would warrant. There are only a few companies that make motherboard chipsets, like Intel, and they have enough price control over the industry that they can do that.

  Also…I’m not sure that ECC is the right fix. I kind of wonder whether the fact is actually that the memory is broken, or that people are manually overclocking and running memory that would be stable at a lower rate at too high of a rate, which will cause that. Or whether BIOSes, which can automatically detect a viable rate by testing memory, are simply being too aggressive in choosing high memory bandwidth rates.

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  • grue@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Also…I’m not sure that ECC is the right fix. I kind of wonder whether the fact is actually that the memory is broken, or that people are manually overclocking and running memory that would be stable at a lower rate at too high of a rate, which will cause that.

    Some of it is cosmic rays, right?

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    • tal@lemmy.today ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      even at JEDEC speeds.

      My last Intel motherboard couldn’t handle all four slots filled with 32GB of memory at rated speeds. Any two sticks yes, four no. From reading online, apparently that was a common problem. Motherboard manufacturers (who must have known that there were issues, from their own testing) did not go out of their way to make this clear.

      Maybe it’s not an issue with registered/buffered memory, but with plain old unregistered DDR5, I think that manufacturers have really selling product above what they can realistically do.

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• user224@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I’ve been checking around the used market for DDR4. It seems used ECC DDR4 sticks are now cheaper due to low demand.

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  • toddestan@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    ECC memory and server hardware in general is surprisingly cheap if you’re fine buying used gear that’s a few years old. Once that stuff gets old enough that it’s being cycled out of data centers en masse, it hits the used market and the supply often exceeds the limited demand for that kind of stuff.

    With that said, I don’t know if that’s true at the moment.

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• Mihies@programming.dev ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  In the middle rampocalypse you even wish for an ECC one?

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  • grue@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    There’s no real good reason that all RAM shouldn’t have been ECC since decades ago. It doesn’t actually cost much more to implement. The only reason it isn’t, as tal’s reply mentioned, is artificial price discrimination.

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