Errors and error correction

Electrical or magnetic interference inside a computer system can cause a single bit of DRAM to spontaneously flip to the opposite state. It was initially thought that this was mainly due to alpha particles emitted by contaminants in chip packaging material, but research^[6] has shown that the majority of one-off ("soft") errors in DRAM chips occur as a result of background radiation, chiefly neutrons from cosmic raysecondaries, which may change the contents of one or more memory cells or interfere with the circuitry used to read/write them. There was some concern that as DRAM density increases further, and thus the components on DRAM chips get smaller, while at the same time operating voltages continue to fall, DRAM chips will be affected by such radiation more frequently—since lower energy particles will be able to change a memory cell's state. On the other hand, smaller cells make smaller targets, and moves to technologies such as SOI may make individual cells less susceptible and so counteract, or even reverse this trend. Recent studies^[7] show that single event upsets due to cosmic radiation have been dropping dramatically with process geometry and previous concerns over increasing bit cell error rates are unfounded.

This problem can be mitigated by using DRAM modules that include extra memory bits and memory controllers that exploit these bits. These extra bits are used to record parity or to use an error-correcting code (ECC). Parity allows the detection of all single-bit errors (actually, any odd number of wrong bits). The most common error correcting code, a SECDED Hamming code, allows a single-bit error to be corrected and (in the usual configuration, with an extra parity bit) double-bit errors to be detected.

Error detection and correction in computer systems seems to go in and out of fashion.^{[citation needed]} Seymour Cray famously said "parity is for farmers" when asked why he left this out of the CDC 6600.^[8] He included parity in the CDC 7600, and reputedly said "I learned that a lot of farmers buy computers."^{[citation needed]} The original IBM PC and all PCs until the early 1990s used parity checking.^[9] Later ones mostly did not. Wider memory buses make parity and especially ECC more affordable. Many current microprocessor memory controllers, including almost all AMD 64-bit offerings, support ECC, but many motherboards and in particular those using low-end chipsets do not.

An ECC-capable memory controller as used in many modern PCs can typically detect and correct errors of a single bit per 64-bit "word" (the unit of bus transfer), and detect (but not correct) errors of two bits per 64-bit word. Some systems also 'scrub' the errors, by writing the corrected version back to memory. The BIOS in some computers, and operating systems such as Linux, allow counting of detected and corrected memory errors, in part to help identify failing memory modules before the problem becomes catastrophic.

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Typically, only machines intended for server use support ECC. Mainboards intended for desktop (rather than server) machines typically do not support ECC, and even those that do support ECC will be shipped with it disabled to allow use of non-ECC memory. Most modern PCs do not support ECC at all as can be seen by examining computer and motherboard specifications; those that do are often supplied with memory modules that do not support parity or ECC. It may be that most users opt for non-ECC systems and memory anyway even when ECC is available. The most important reasons for this are:

• the higher cost of ECC memory (each bank is 9 memory chips compared to 8 for non-ECC memory, and more importantly there is more volume for non-ECC. In some cases the price ratio reduces to 9/8, as an example, on 2008/11/30, on Crucial.com, an ECC CL=5 unbuffered 2GB DDR2-667 DIMM costs $30 while the corresponding non-ECC part costs $28, a difference of 1/15, however some ECC modules cost twice as much as their non-ECC equivalents [Crucial CT12872Z40B and CT12864Z40B, Jan 2009]);
• the higher cost of a motherboard that supports ECC functionality in RAM;
• the additional time needed for ECC memory controllers to perform the error checking and possibly the correction steps, which may lead to an all-around performance hit of around 0.5–2 percent, depending on application;^[10] and
• simple ignorance of the issue.

Error detection and correction depends on an expectation of the kinds of errors that occur. Implicitly, we have assumed that the failure of each bit in a word of memory is independent and hence that two simultaneous errors are improbable. This used to be the case when memory chips were one bit wide (typical in the first half of the 1980s). Now many bits are in the same chip. This weakness does not seem to be widely addressed; one exception is Chipkill.

Recent tests give widely varying error rates with over 7 orders of magnitude difference, ranging from 10⁻¹⁰−10⁻¹⁷ error/bit·h, roughly one bit error, per hour, per gigabyte of memory to one bit error, per century, per gigabyte of memory.^[7][11][12]

In most computers used for serious scientific or financial computing and as servers, ECC is the rule rather than the exception, as can be seen by examining manufacturers' specifications.