Your [3] has a footnote quoting a Google book that reads "Modern DRAM systems are a good example of a case in which powerful error correction can be provided at a very low additional cost... The following machine generation at Google did include memory parity detection, and once the price of memory with ECC dropped to competitive levels, all subsequent generations have used ECC DRAM"

Well They made a big deal out of it and lots of PR out of not having use ECC, and only quietly adding back ECC and listed it out in a book that barely any one reads.

The fact that ECC isn't the default across everything is a failure of human cognition and Capitalism.

I have always been angry that ECC was treated as an "enterprise" feature and increased the price way more than it should have.

It's treated as enterprise because most regular users had no realistic reason to care about it. The practical consequences of not having this on your phone or home PC are completely invisible for the vast majority of people. Because of this and the fact that in the consumer space prices matter most the situation is quite expected.

Users most definitely want it. They just aren't technically literate enough to know about it.

Hello user, for an extra 10 dollars, would you like to guarantee that cosmic radiation never affects your computing experience, including having to reformat, reinstall, or otherwise reboot your phone/computer randomly when one day something just doesn't work anymore?

Was it an update? Was it cosmic radiation? Was it a bad capacitor? Who knows!

Why do you think so many problems are solved by rebooting? Sure 99 out of 100 might be software bugs, but the other 1 out of 100 is straight up cosmic radiation, and that 1 percent is growing more and more every year as software becomes more robust and bug free with better tooling.

Indeed, users don't know enough to care but more than that, for most users this is simply not a problem because they haven't been practically affected. Most may never experience a bit flip, and most of the flips won't be obvious anyway (e.g. no visible effect).

So your hypothetical dialogue will sound more like a scam to a regular user. You're charging money to tackle a problem they don't have or see, only addressing a single one of the root causes that trigger that same result, and in the end you're not even completely fixing it, just reducing the already infinitesimal odds it happens.

It will become mainstream when manufacturers just decides to include it everywhere and not really give the user a choice. Apple is a prime candidate for a company with enough clout to afford this.

My point is, they have been affected. I think most people have seen bitflips.

>2009 Google's paper "DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study" says that there can be up to 25000-75000 one-bit FIT per Mbit (failures in time per billion hours), which is equal to 1 - 5 bit errors per hour for 8GB of RAM after my calculations. Paper says the same: "mean correctable error rates of 2000–6000 per GB per year".

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580933/cosmic-rays-what...

I believe bitflips are far more common than people realize. I see weird shit all the time from my users that is only explainable due to bizarre software bugs or bitflips.

Bit flips are reasonably common, but mean is of very little use when one stick can throw no errors and another stick can throw thousands. A more useful quote is "About a third of machines and over 8% of DIMMs in our fleet saw at least one correctable error per year."

But behringer, regular users don't see bitflips, they see "a random error", a random reboot, a random green pixel in a photo. That's if they even consciously observed anything at all. You yourself said those could have a dozen other root causes. I for one have not actually observed a bitflip (so something that I can actually consciously detect as an issue) in a decade. No unexpected reboots, no unexpected file corruption, etc., nothing that made me say "weird, must be some memory corruption".

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for ECC memory, I practically showed the value of ECC after intentionally running the same multi-day Matlab job several times on a non-ECC machine with different results just to prove this very point. But you use your deeper knowledge to assume what someone with shallow knowledge and interest wants or needs, and that will almost always be off mark. Your car does not have a roll cage. Normal computers do not have ECC memory.

"Your car does not have a roll cage" No but the crash structures are one of the areas where we are absolutely trying to recreate the effect of a rollcage without the weight. The weight putting constraints on fuel efficiency is the big issue there.

For ECC, there's no reason to really expect that adding ECC to everything would really make things too expensive or slow long term. For a long time the reason why desktops did not have ECC was pretty much because intel wanted people who really need ECC to buy Xeons.

> No but the crash structures are one of the areas where we are absolutely trying to recreate the effect of a rollcage without the weight

Exactly like how we try to recreate the effect of ECC hardware but without its "weight" (cost, complexity). For a problem that's not nearly as visible or life and death.

> too expensive or slow long term

Not "too" expensive long term still means more expensive especially short term, like when the person buys it. For an issue no average consumer is actually frustrated about. Why are we still debating why those consumers don't care about ECC? How is it different from hot swappable RAM for the average Joe? They'll upgrade or expand their RAM more often than they'll get frustrated about the effect of bitflips. So why not have hot swappable memory? Because as much as I'd love hot swappable anything, regular consumers neither care about it nor want to pay for it.

>So your hypothetical dialogue will sound more like a scam to a regular user. You're charging money to tackle a problem they don't have or see,

I don't know the same argument could be made and ecc be swapped with surge protectors and people still purchase those.

I feel this way about all software.

Just because capitalism fails to provide something does not mean that communism would solve the problem, or that criticism of capitalism as a system is uncalled for. This is not some kind of binary capitalism/communism world we live in.

i'm just struggling to find the link between capitalism and ECC memory.

It's the act of maximizing profits by segmenting the market that creates artificially bad products that end up being the mainstream because of the price difference. If the companies responsible for making these decisions were optimizing just a tad bit more for practicality and usability rather than just profit, ECC would be the standard and that would be the end of that. Similar to how a lot of luxury and non-luxury cars will have seemingly essential and cheap equipment only available as part of an expensive options package - the cost of producing and installing the extra equipment is a mere fraction of the total package cost, a large majority will end up buying the package anyway (and 100% would if money was no object). One might argue that this practice is part and parcel of modern industrial markets, and is almost fair - prices are arbitrary and consumers get to pay for the value they get out of something, there is no optimal, moral way to determine what someone's margins should be, yadda yadda. In my opinion, usually the market will choose what are acceptable margins on a given product and/or service, but with 2 thousand dollar parking sensors and double-the-price ECC memory, with artifical segmentation, I'm paying not for the manufacturing and delivery of a product with a feature I want, but instead I'm having to pay for the opportunity of being able to have the product with the features I want + the manufacturing and delivery.

> double-the-price ECC memory

I was buying DDR4 RAM last week and the cost for a 4x8GB ECC+Registered DDR4 3200 RAM kit for a Xeon W build I’ll be doing soon was about 5% more expensive than for a kit of otherwise identical RAM kit for a non-ECC Core i7 rig - which also came with tacky RGB LED heatspreader - about $230 in total for each of them.

The fact the pricing was so similar does make me wonder about the claims that non-ECC RAM is really ECC RAM just without the CPU/MMU being made aware of it - I think that’s possible if the RAM is already Buffered/Registered.

Oh wow, the prices have normalized a bit - about 18 months ago I had to pay about twice the money to get 64 gigabytes of ECC goodness.

> The fact the pricing was so similar does make me wonder about the claims that non-ECC RAM is really ECC RAM just without the CPU/MMU being made aware of it - I think that’s possible if the RAM is already Buffered/Registered.

Who claims that? And can't you just count the chips?

Market segmentation.

There is no link. Segmentation of ECC support was an Intel decision which other chip manufactures have copied to a greater or lesser extent. For what it's worth, ECC support is spotty in Chinese-designed chips as well.

Intel's decision could just as well have been made by a socialist government's regulatory body (in the form of "minimum requirements for consumer chip" legislation), or by a committee of decision makers in an employee-owned company. We may never know, because we only have 2-4 data points and they're all basically capitalist.

Honestly, I'm not sure it was intended to be a serious comment. It could just as easily have been "...failure of human cognition and Obama."