Bitsquatting, rowhammer and silent corruption. Basically, ECC should be the universal standard in all network gear, servers and endpoint (user) devices. Not creates an attack surface and opportunity for data-loss.
Does anyone have an idea of the cost increase for using ECC RAM in a mobile device for instance? Are there also power usage concerns to worry about?
AFAIK there are basically zero consumer devices using ECC RAM.
I want to say I had ECC in my old AMD K6-350, but that was a lot of years ago. Either way, I'm pretty sure they have supported it for a long time and in many of their CPUs, even the CPUs aimed at consumers.
Here's a comment I made last night, if you want to dig in and find some current offerings:
Same reason ECC is not supported on consumer processors from Intel. Here it would be almost trivial to add, but they don't.
Simple business strategy.
So, they're okay with it on consumer parts, as long as you're not looking to do anything resembling professional work I guess.
Technically. A fraction of a percent increase in die size for the memory transceivers, basically nothing for making and verifying checksums.
It's all business strategy.
manufacturing cost is non-linear. Obviously intrinsically word gunk.
And in a lucky coincidence it turns out that those who want ECC are willing to pay the moon for it, which of course gatekeepers like Intel exploit.
Basically there's no evidence that ECC memory is signficantly slower or more expensive than non-ECC memory. Obviously it's slightly more complex than non-ECC memory, but it's not a particularly high-tech addition. For all its supposed complexity/slowness, Samsung is using it in its caches on their Exynos SoCs.
Everything can be perfectly explained in terms of market segmentation.
However, in many applications we find that using (forward) error correction almost always increases data density (for storage) or bandwidth (for transmission), simply because a FEC stream does not require a nearly-perfect channel any more. This is the way hard disks, SSDs, WiFi, LTE, DSL, ..., satellite communications, ...[, ...][, ...] are able to cram incredible amounts of data into very noisy channels. Thus, ECC significantly lowers cost in many dimensions (be it frequency spectra, storage prices, not having to re-cable entire countries...).
(And if you don't use the extra noise margin to increase density/bandwidth, then you can use it to increase reliability, like we usually do with ECC memory)
Thinking about it for a few minutes, the memory bus will most likely be the only bus in your computer that has no error correction/detection. USB, SATA, PCIe, all of them require it. The main memory will also most likely be the only storage that doesn't use it (apart from firmware flash chips and the like, but these often use a checksum at least).
Do you mean that ECC has those benefits, or that other applications of error correcting codes has them?
Personally, I've always found this to be very annoying. The only people using non-ECC memory should be Xtreme Gamer type people who don't care about their data and only care about squeezing that last 2% out of their system to land at the top of the penis size chart. Non-ECC should be a feature like liquid N2 cooling.
The moral of this story is that ECC is only ever advertised explicitly, when it is special to have, i.e. because there are segments in the market where it is not used.
(A somewhat curious case are small microcontrollers. Often these control relatively important aspects of machinery, for example, drives [say a bit-flip in the drive controller turns STOP into RUN, which can get rather ugly on e.g. a lathe]; these usually don't have ECC. However, they are manufactured in very coarse processes and generally don't use DRAM.)
The real question though for a large scale consumer product manufacturer is how much margin they could convince the RAM makers to give up on ECC. Once it became standard, it probably would not cost much more than non ECC. Maybe 15% more? (1/8th extra memory, plus some extra for other expenses.)
It is nice to see "EDAC amd64: DRAM ECC enabled." in my dmesg output. :) That, and the NVMe SSD is screaming fast.
I'm debating whether to try my hand at overclocking my R7-1700, but even leaving it at the stock clocking it's pretty speedy, and it runs cool with the stock cooler.