Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 14 Jul 1997 05:47:10 -0700
From:      David Greenman <dg@root.com>
To:        Nadav Eiron <nadav@barcode.co.il>
Cc:        dmaddox@scsn.net, Wes Peters - Softweyr LLC <softweyr@xmission.com>, Nick Johnson <spatula@gulf.net>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: A few solutions 
Message-ID:  <199707141247.FAA06163@implode.root.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 14 Jul 1997 15:02:15 %2B0300." <33CA1547.AD3@barcode.co.il> 

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
>No. What you need is ECC motherboard and ECC RAM. To be able to correct
>memeory errors you need more bits than what's available on a parity
>SIMM. Some ECC implementation (the one I have in mind is the AlphaServer
>1000, don't know if Pentium MBs have this too) use standard RAM, but in
>greater quantity. The AlphaServer 1000 has banks of 5 standard SIMMs,
>instead of the 4 that would otherwise be required for its 128 bit memory
>bus. It uses the extra memory to implement ECC. Later models used 4 ECC
>SIMMs instead.

   ECC for 64bit words requires 8 syndrome bits. Coincidently, that just
happens to be the number of parity bits you'd have if you had byte parity
SIMMs, so modern PC motherboards use the 8 parity bits to implement ECC
and no special ECC SIMMs are required.

-DG

David Greenman
Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199707141247.FAA06163>