Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is getting denser

Re:Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is... by vbezhenar on Friday May 28, 2021 @05:37PM (#27320823)

Do you think many Ryzen PCs use ECC? I doubt that. It's accepted truth among gamers and power users, that ECC is waste of budget. I don't share this position, but if you'd ask on some computer forums, that's what you'll hear. If ECC would be enabled on all Intel CPUs, nothing fundamentally would change, most users would prefer to save 10% on their RAM.

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Re:Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is... by Dylan16807 on Saturday May 29, 2021 @02:22AM (#27323427)

> It's accepted truth among gamers and power users, that ECC is waste of budget.

A waste of budget at what price?

Are they actually looking at $80 of ram becoming $90, or are they looking at it becoming $160 and slower? Which is about what I see when I go check newegg.

I don't think you can extrapolate current decisions to a world where adding ECC is 12% of the RAM budget and 1-2% of the total budget.

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Re:Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is... by staticassertion on Friday May 28, 2021 @09:05PM (#27322253)

The price of ECC is artificially inflated because it's not available to consumers.

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Re:Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is... by Laforet on Saturday May 29, 2021 @12:28AM (#27323028)

At minimum ECC will cost you an extra 12.5% for the extra bit of RAM. That part is not inflated.

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Re:Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is... by staticassertion on Saturday May 29, 2021 @01:24AM (#27323244)

Yeah I wasn't trying to imply it would cost nothing to add ECC.

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Re:Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is... by GekkePrutser on Friday May 28, 2021 @05:40PM (#27320853)

I don't use it on mine, but my Ryzen PC is my gaming box.. Where the impact from such things is very limited.

But ECC RAM is a lot more than 10% more expensive. This is part of the problem. Intel pushes it into a high-end niche which puts it in a much more expensive category, and it also loses economy of scale.

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Re:Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is... by patrakov on Saturday May 29, 2021 @11:20AM (#27325806)

Not sure about PCs, but my Ryzen laptop (HP EliteBook 835 G6) seems to use the AMD technology for memory encryption, with per-boot keys. This is not ECC, but also good enough to counteract RowHammer, because the attacker cannot target specific bits.

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Re:Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is... by ghoward on Friday May 28, 2021 @07:56PM (#27321904)

I use it on my Ryzen PC, but I am also running ZFS, and I'm a little paranoid about using my data.

This is one anecdote, though, so it's probably not useful. But people using ECC on Ryzen do exist.

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