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To: Craig M. Newmark who wrote (115141)	10/29/2000 6:12:44 PM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Craig, thanks for that article. Sun servers lack ECC protection. "Frankly, we just missed it. It's something we regret at this point," Shoemaker says. Its next high-end servers, based on a new processor called the UltraSparc III, will have ECC protection; they are to debut in mid-2001. No ECC on the cache? That's pretty bad. IBM and HP sales people should have a field day over that one. Tony

To: Craig M. Newmark who wrote (115141)	10/29/2000 6:13:41 PM
From: Saturn V	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Ref <Sun says it has finally figured out what's wrong. It is an odd problem involving stray cosmic rays and memory chips > This is the old problem with memory chips - "The Soft Error Problem", known for more than twenty years. Cosmic Rays or Alpha particles emitted from trace amounts of radioactive material in chip packaging, can cause random memory bits to lose data. At the system level the solution is straight forward. It involves adding extra and redunant memory chips, which enable Error Detection and Correction. Most Servers with large memory have this scheme. Apparently Sun erred in implementing Error Detection and Correction, or plain forgot to implement Error Correction

To: Craig M. Newmark who wrote (115141)	10/29/2000 7:24:44 PM
From: jim kelley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Cosmic rays!? Sounds like BS to me. It is more likely alpha particles. Just like SUNW to cover it up though. They have an in house policy of covering up their system flaws and bugs.

To: Craig M. Newmark who wrote (115141)	10/29/2000 7:51:12 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Craig - re: 'It is an odd problem involving stray cosmic rays and memory chips in the flagship Enterprise server line, ' Cosmic Ray induced soft-error upset has been known for quite awhile - but why would SUN be subject to this failure and not any other manufacturers using similar memory (I thought it was the Cache memory) technology? Paul