How come no one uses chipkill ECC RAM?

[Mark R]

Just wondering, because chipkill ECC looks to be a significant advantage of Opteron over other server grade CPUs like Xeon.

Is it just lack of demand? There are plenty of sources of registered ECC RAM. To make a DIMM chipkill, doesn't need any additional circuitry, just careful wiring of the DIMM and use of 18 memory chips instead of 9 which are normally used.

Just dreaming about building an opteron server, and investigating all the options.

In case anyone doesn't know - Chipkill ECC is a variant of ECC. While ECC requires the DIMM hold 9 MB of chips for every 8 MB of accessible memory - Chipkill ECC needs no more memory over and above conventional ECC.

It does, however, provide much more robust protection against memory malfunction - including continued flawless operation, even if an entire chip on a DIMM dies completely.

 

[Soulkeeper]

as far as i'm concerned ecc ddr memory is ecc ddr memory 🙂
what i mean to say is just choose what price/quality you wish to have
the margin of difference might be lower than you think if it is indeed entering a server/workstation environment with little or preferably no overclocking involved 🙂

 

[AndyHui]

IBM uses it in a lot of their servers. Going to be spending $50,000 on a whole bunch of IBM x306, x345 and x365 servers next week at work.

 

[oldman420]

Originally posted by: AndyHui
IBM uses it in a lot of their servers. Going to be spending $50,000 on a whole bunch of IBM x306, x345 and x365 servers next week at work.

what os will they have?

 

[AndyHui]

Probably going to be still stuck on Win2K Server. Replacing NT servers...😛

 

[Zepper]

Registered ECC memory is standard in servers for reliablity and so a large number of DIMM sockets in single channel configuration can be used reliably to hold lots of memory. I don't know about chipkill, but it sounds like it should be standard for applications where zero downtime is a requirement.
..bh.