Torvalds rants at Intel

Stefan Mileschin · 7th January 2021, 06:42

Killed the whole ECC industry

IT’s Mr Sweary Linux creator Linus Torvalds has accused Intel of preventing widespread use of error-correcting memory and being "instrumental in killing the whole ECC industry with its horribly bad market segmentation".

ECC memory uses additional parity bits to verify that the data read from memory is the same as the data that was written. Without this check, memory is vulnerable to occasional corruption where a bit is flipped spontaneously, for example, by background radiation.

ECC memory solves these problems and has been available for over 50 years yet most personal computers do not use it.

What gets Torvalds’ goat is that is that Intel has made ECC support a feature of its Xeon range, aimed at servers and high-end workstations, and does not support it in other ranges such as the Core series.

During a discussion about AMD's new Zen 3 Ryzen 9 5000 series processors on the Real World Tech forum site one person said that he didn’t see AMD's unofficial ECC support being a big deal.

https://fudzilla.com/news/52150-torvalds-rants-at-intel

7th January 2021, 06:42	#1
Stefan Mileschin [M] Reviewer Join Date: May 2010 Location: Romania Posts: 148,738	Torvalds rants at Intel Killed the whole ECC industry IT’s Mr Sweary Linux creator Linus Torvalds has accused Intel of preventing widespread use of error-correcting memory and being "instrumental in killing the whole ECC industry with its horribly bad market segmentation". ECC memory uses additional parity bits to verify that the data read from memory is the same as the data that was written. Without this check, memory is vulnerable to occasional corruption where a bit is flipped spontaneously, for example, by background radiation. ECC memory solves these problems and has been available for over 50 years yet most personal computers do not use it. What gets Torvalds’ goat is that is that Intel has made ECC support a feature of its Xeon range, aimed at servers and high-end workstations, and does not support it in other ranges such as the Core series. During a discussion about AMD's new Zen 3 Ryzen 9 5000 series processors on the Real World Tech forum site one person said that he didn’t see AMD's unofficial ECC support being a big deal. https://fudzilla.com/news/52150-torvalds-rants-at-intel

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