People who tout this don't understand the probability of bit flips. It's measured in failures per _billion_ hours of operation. This matters a ton in an environment with thousands of memory modules (data centers and super computers) but you're lucky to experience a single ram bit flip more than once or twice in your entire life
Looks like things are worse than I thought (but still better than most people seem to think). Interesting to note that the motherboard used affects error rate, and it seems that part of it is a luck of the draw situation where some dimms have more errors than others despite being the same manufacturer
Bit flips are guaranteed to happen in digital systems. No matter how low the probability is, it will never be zero. You can't go around thinking you're going to dodge a bullet because its unlikely. If it weren't for the pervasive use of error detection in common I/O protocols you would be subjected to these errors much more frequently.
We're talking specifically about ECC ram, which solves the specific problem caused by cosmic rays (and apparently bad motherboard design). IO protocol error correction is a totally different problem.
I still think it made sense up until now to not bother with it on consumer hardware, and even at this point. The probability of your phone having a software glitch needing a reboot is way higher. Now that it's practically a free upgrade? Should be included by default. But I still don't think it's nearly as nefarious as people make it out to be that it has been this way for so long
I don’t think they are an issue in a phone, but in a system like a blockchain that goes through so much effort to achieve consistency, the severity of the error is magnified hence the lesser tolerance for the error rate.
Edit: there's some new (to me) information from real world results, interesting read. https://www.zdnet.com/article/dram-error-rates-nightmare-on-...
Looks like things are worse than I thought (but still better than most people seem to think). Interesting to note that the motherboard used affects error rate, and it seems that part of it is a luck of the draw situation where some dimms have more errors than others despite being the same manufacturer