A few years ago I designed a way to detect bit-flips in Firefox crash reports and last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes. Today I was looking at the data that comes out of these tests and now I'm 100% positive that the heuristic is sound and a lot of the crashes we see are from users with bad memory or similarly flaky hardware. Here's a few numbers to give you an idea of how large the problem is. 🧵 1/5
My last Intel motherboard couldn’t handle all four slots filled with 32GB of memory at rated speeds. Any two sticks yes, four no. From reading online, apparently that was a common problem. Motherboard manufacturers (who must have known that there were issues, from their own testing) did not go out of their way to make this clear.
Maybe it’s not an issue with registered/buffered memory, but with plain old unregistered DDR5, I think that manufacturers have really selling product above what they can realistically do.
My last Intel motherboard couldn’t handle all four slots filled with 32GB of memory at rated speeds. Any two sticks yes, four no. From reading online, apparently that was a common problem. Motherboard manufacturers (who must have known that there were issues, from their own testing) did not go out of their way to make this clear.
Maybe it’s not an issue with registered/buffered memory, but with plain old unregistered DDR5, I think that manufacturers have really selling product above what they can realistically do.