[rescue] ECC [was: Re: WOT: Ebay changes to IBM from Sun E10Kservers?]

[Dave McGuire]

On Thursday, July 10, 2003, at 10:50 AM, Scott Newell wrote:
> I was under the impression that ECC memory was primarily used to 
> recover
> and continue from unusual events (such as a cosmic ray bit flip), not 
> to
> correct for failing or broken hardware.  Seems reasonable that the more
> memory you have, the more likely such an event.
>
> Hmmm...has semiconductor process scaling made modern devices more or 
> less
> susceptible to cosmic rays?

   I'm not a physicist, but with shrinking feature geometries and 
decreasing logic thresholds, I'd guess they're becoming much more 
susceptible.

         -Dave

--
Dave McGuire             "I've grown hair again, just
St. Petersburg, FL           for the occasion."       -Doc Shipley