Comment by bcrl

If anyone thinks that on-die ECC is a good thing as the manufactuers are touting, please go read the discussions on this topic over in the forums at www.realworldtech.com. The goal of on die ECC is purely to ensure that DRAM manufacturers are able to obtain better yields by reducing the impact of defects, which is not the same as ensuring data integrity. This means that it fails the "trust but verify" tenant. Even worse is that some failures may not even get reported to the system as is the case with ECC implemented in the memory controllers and caches of modern CPUs. The industry is trying to make this look like a good thing, but I'm on the same side as Linus Torvalds: all modern systems should ship with ECC memory. IBM got it right with parity memory in the IBM PC.