I really wish we’d just get in-band ECC on normal consumer platforms. That way we’d need no special DIMMs, in applications where ECC was desired it could be enabled and the capacity penalty would be paid, in other applications it could be disabled and no capacity would be lost.
I like this idea. 64gb of ram non-ecc, 48gb in ecc. Dynamic, succinct, and enables more supply chain cross over for not having two (three?) separate DIMM types.
On AMD ECC support is pretty much standard on every chip they make, and always has been. Even my shitty 4-core phenom from over ten years ago on an el-cheapo motherboard supported swapping it's regular DIMMs for ECC ones. You're never going to get ECC "for free" but it would be totally possible for everyone to pay the cost once and just move to ECC-only for everything from now on.
Except intel, the company that brought software-locked hardware features to x86, love to price-differentiate.
Having physical memory segments be different logical sizes at runtime depending on the ECC setting does not sound fun.
Having your system’s available memory fluctuate up and down based on how many segments are currently set to ECC also doesn’t sound fun.
Having developers manually turn ECC off for regions where it’s unimportant sounds like a lot of complexity for a relatively rare use case.
There is in-band ECC in some newer Intel designs, but it’s all or nothing. Adding extremely complexity to memory management to selectively disable it sounds like a lot to ask.
I think your reading depends on thinking "application" means "process", while another reading would be that an application is a particular deployed system, where this setting can be altered e.g. at the BIOS level.
