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Linus Torvalds On The Importance Of ECC RAM, Calls Out Intel's "Bad Policies" Over ECC
There's nothing quite like some fun holiday-weekend reading as a fiery mailing list post by Linus Torvalds. The Linux creator is out with one of his classical messages, which this time is arguing over the importance of ECC memory and his opinion on how Intel's "bad policies" and market segmentation have made ECC memory less widespread.
Linus argues that error-correcting code (ECC) memory "absolutely matters" but that "Intel has been instrumental in killing the whole ECC industry with it's horribly bad market segmentation... Intel has been detrimental to the whole industry and to users because of their bad and misguided policies wrt ECC. Seriously...The arguments against ECC were always complete and utter garbage... Now even the memory manufacturers are starting [to] do ECC internally because they finally owned up to the fact that they absolutely have to. And the memory manufacturers claim it's because of economics and lower power. And they are lying bastards - let me once again point to row-hammer about how those problems have existed for several generations already, but these f*ckers happily sold broken hardware to consumers and claimed it was an "attack", when it always was "we're cutting corners"."
Ian Cutress from AnandTech points out in a reply that AMD's Ryzen ECC support is not as solid as believed.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday January 08 2021, @03:14PM
Gotcha. Hmm...I suppose it might - I don't really know QM well enough to say anything for sure. It's probably not very common though. To start with, a classic electron is far smaller than a nucleus, which is itself around 1/10,000th the size of the atom - even with a hundred classical "billiard ball" electrons orbiting the nucleus, the odds that any of them would be directly in the path of a neutron as it comes rocketing out of the nucleus are *extremely* low. And in reality electrons are more of a distributed wavefunction that interacts almost entirely via electric charge, which the neutron doesn't have. I believe neutrons do have spin, which might interact with an electron... but I think spin is mostly factor in when two identical wavefunctions are trying to occupy exactly the same space.