Linus Torvalds accuses Intel of throttling ECC memory and praises AMD for its support

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Linus Torvalds accuses Intel of throttling ECC memory and praises AMD for its support

Linux father Linus Torvalds lashed out at Intel’s ECC memory policy. By its actions, Intel actually strangled this memory on client platforms, which caused increased system instability and vulnerability to Rowhammer attacks. He has one hope in AMD, which unofficially allows ECC memory to work on Ryzen platforms.

ryzen x370
ryzen x370

“Intel has hurt the entire industry and users because of its bad and flawed ECC policies. Jokes aside , ”writes Torvalds. ECC support is not only about the stability of computers, although it is also important, even if failures due to errors in the operation of memory modules are very rare. Memory manufacturers have been trying to mitigate the memory hacking threat known as Rowhammer for over a decade.

ECC memory would easily solve the Rowhammer problem, but Intel long ago stopped supporting ECC memory on consumer platforms. Rowhammer attack refers to side-channel attacks. The cracker writes data to the selected memory cells with such intensity that the data changes in the cells adjacent to them. Thus, it is possible to attack the unprotected memory area and change the data in the protected area. Recent research has shown that continuous improvement in memory specifications has never been able to solve this problem, which ECC mechanisms could easily deal with.

Torvalds considers AMD to be a bright ray in this gloom of monotony. The new Ryzen consumer platforms, while unofficially and without certification, support ECC memory. And since there is support, then motherboard manufacturers, and then memory manufacturers can increase the segment of the market for memory modules with ECC. For the end-user, this memory will cost a little more than memory without error correction, but this is a reasonable premium for system stability and protection against malware.