
James Gosling on radioactive cache RAM chips and the death of Sun (2010) - sgt
http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/at_the_mercy_of_suppliers
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drudru11
3 things

1\. This problem used to occur in ceramic packaging. A physicists the early
Intel discovered this problem.

2\. Those who say ECC isn't necessary are usually the ones who never measure
error rates.

3\. Cheap x86 killed Sun, not this.

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sgt
On pt 3: Perhaps cheap x86 would have killed Sun anyway. But it could be
possible that this Ultrasparc-ii disaster and the subsequental loss of huge
clients were the killing blow.

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matheweis
Wow, it wasn't even the RAM, it was the packaging, that had in turn made the
RAM chips also radioactive!

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joezydeco
A stray alpha particle from the packaging won't turn the RAM die radioactive,
but it _will_ flip bits which is the problem Gosling is describing.

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matheweis
He says the packaging was radioactive, but (I assume) it would have been
discarded at the factory during assembly.

So where did the particles come from at runtime?

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theandrewbailey
The CPU packaging is the material that the literal silicon is mounted on and
sealed with. The CPU pins go through it. Sometimes there is a metal heat
spreader attached to it. It's not the plastic wrap and box product packaging.

Wikipedia has some good photos of the UltraSPARC II CPU packaging:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_II)

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matheweis
Also, this should be labeled [2010]

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sgt
How do I change the title?

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dang
You can do it for a couple hours by clicking 'edit'. After that, we have to do
it. We did it.

