SK Hynix slips past rivals Samsung and Micron to launch world's first DDR5 DRAM sticks

South Korean memory giant SK Hynix has released the world's first commercially available DDR5 DRAM sticks, pipping rivals Samsung and Micron. First developed in 2018 before shipping off to partners for compatibility and functionality tests, these 16GB sticks promise faster transfer rates as well as lower power consumption. The …

[Robert Sneddon]

ECC

Good to hear that new memory devices are coming with intrinsic error-correcting capabilities, given the large amounts of RAM fitted to even commodity machines these days.

[DS999]

Re: ECC

It isn't the same as ECC DIMMs - it is internal only and not the same degree of ECC that ECC DIMMs have. So you will still want ECC DIMMs for servers/workstations, but it is an improvement over the complete lack of protection a typical desktop PC had.

[FILE_ID.DIZ]

Re: ECC

I'm not sure what the the marketing people are drinking there, but ECC proper also corrects 1-bit errors.

In fact, they literally mention error correcting code in the article.

Smells like a duck, walks like a duck...

[confused and dazed]

Re: ECC

There is on-chip ECC. Servers will also have the option of having ECC R/LRDIMMs also. Remember this is a dual channel DIMM now - so it's no longer x72 wide, rather 2x40

[DS999]

Re: ECC

The on chip ECC can correct single bit errors. It does no reporting of errors though so you'll never know that the chip is bad. Since it doesn't report it doesn't do the detection of multibit errors that it can't correct like module level ECC does.

Thus why you still need ECC DIMMs for a server or workstation where you care about reliability. That gives you 1) reporting of errors, corrected or not 2) protection for the data path between CPU and DIMM and 3) support for more advanced stuff like chipkill.

But the on chip ECC is better than nothing for desktop PCs. Instead of random crashes you can only diagnose if you're lucky enough to find identify that memory is the culprit and which DIMM it is via memtest86, those single bit errors will be silently corrected.

Unfortunately it also means that memory vendors might be tempted to sell flakier chips that they wouldn't sell today, figuring that the ECC will hide the flakiness from the buyer.

[confused and dazed]

Re: ECC

Memory vendors are not doing this to improve reliability, more to keep it acceptable as geometries shrink and we see more "scaling effects"