and still no ECC support, sigh

Another fun way to get corrupted memory is to have some data swapped to disk, but have disk corruption, then have the corrupt disk data restored to memory. Bam. Instant invalid data in memory, but not caused by memory.

Many hashes are fast these days and should be used as checksums in more places since ECC isn't as common as it should be (and ECC doesn't detect all errors anyway).

Are there any technical reasons not to have ECC by default, or is it just market segmentation?

†I'm using a one processor chip X9SAE to type this with, with HDMI output with sound included to my receiver and then monitor.

It is segmentation for sure -- the chipsets and processors can easily support it -- and many of the people throughout this thread really should only be looking at Xeons. If 64GB of RAM and non-ECC memory is really such a problem, which it is for a vanishingly small percentage of users, go with a workstation chip at a small premium and have it all.

It's notable that effectively no mobile devices use ECC memory. Tablets don't. The vast majority of desktops don't. If you believed the rhetoric, these should all be crashing and destroying lives regularly. It turns out that ECC comes into play very, very infrequently. I would never buy a server that didn't have ECC, but on my desktop it just really doesn't matter that much.

Enthusiast testing seems to support this with overhead being <0.5% even for Reg ECC:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/ECC-and-REG-ECC-M...

I've run diskless, boot-from-network systems with 2 to 4 GB RAM with the entire OS+data+servers in memory. If you know your exact sizes, you don't need giant RAM.

As far as desktop or interactive systems go, in 2009 I made a desktop with 24 GB RAM which essentially never read from the disk after everything got cached appropriately.

save to disk periodically.

That's what your kernel does. There's a long history of flushing dirty pages back to disk.

My dream machine would be

It looks like you want a MacBook Pro from 3 years ago?

Sure: don't open so many tabs.

That would be very unreliable, would cause huge loading times, huge powerdown times. Also modern OS uses free memory as a disk cache, so you are already getting all speed benefits.

So basically you might just do find / -type f -exec cat {} > /dev/null \; to fill your disk cache if you have enough memory.

Linux does copy-to-ram for at least decade (Slax, Knoppix...).

> My dream machine would be 13/14" laptop

Toshiba Portege Z30 supports 16GB RAM, in theory it handles 32GB RAM. I am waiting for new version with Skylike and retina.

I use the Slitaz distribution on my old Compaq computer from 1999, and wow! Even with only 384 MB of RAM, the system is blazing fast, all thanks to copy-to-ram!

Looking at those benchmarks[2] the Skylake i5 is no slouch but I just have an aversion to the i5 for no rational reason whatsoever. Seems to be clocked lower and doesn't have hyper-threading. If you're going to get the top of the line CPU and chipset you may as well go for the i7 rather than the i5. is my thinking. I guess the i5 exists to create mid-range gear -- pair an i7 with a dedicated GPU, i5 uses integrated; i7 gets a retina panel w/ touch, i5 gets 1080p and no touch; i7 gets more RAM, i5 gets less; and so on.

[1] http://www.dell.com/ie/p/xps-13-9343-laptop/pd

[2] http://anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-66...