On Dec 2,  8:17pm, "John F. Woods" wrote:
} Subject: Re: ASUS P55TP4 motherboard experiences?
} > The upper markets, workstation, mainframe,
} > supercomputer, etc. would never stand for this kind of nonsense.
} 
} "Parity is for farmers."
} 	- Seymour Cray, on why the Cray 1 supercomputer did *not* have parity.

     Oops.  That leaves the question of what the follow-ons, and other
brands of supercomputers do.  Also, Seymour Cray may have been a
genius, but that doesn't mean he was perfect.  I would be interested
in his justification for the above quote (just because somebody famous
says something doesn't mean you have to, or should accept it blindly).

} With memory reliability as good as it is, parity is probably of dubious
} utility; it is no longer to be *expected* that memory will fail during the
} life of a computer.  Any application with data valuable enough to need

     This may be so, but as somebody whose hats include "computer
hardware technician", I know full well that memory can and will fail.
So will cache, which is real fun to diagnose.  Anything that reduces
the reliability and integrity of a system is extremely bad in my
opinion.  All of my personal systems have parity, and I will never use
one of the new-fangled motherboards that don't support parity.

} parity protection probably really needs ECC, which enables the system
} to continue running with *correct* data and logs errors for proactive
} replacement.  "We're sorry, but a parity error swallowed the deposit of

     This may be so, but ECC is still too expensive for many
applications; whereas, parity is not that much more expensive then
non-parity (provided you know how to source it), and prevents data
corruption.

}-- End of excerpt from "John F. Woods"