The economics will never favor this approach. Customers will not choose to pay double to avoid the 1-in-a-million chance of occasionally getting a slightly wrong answer.
Does it have to be double? I know it's not a direct analogue, but parity schemes like RAID 6 or ECC RAM don't double the cost.
So the question is, how do you check these results without actually doing them twice? Is there a role here for frameworks or OS to impose sanity checks? Obviously we already have assertions, but something gentler than a panic, where it says "this is suspect, let's go back and confirm."
> Customers will not choose to pay double to avoid the 1-in-a-million chance of occasionally getting a slightly wrong answer.
With today's high-speed multi-core processors, a 1-in-a-million chance of a computation error would mean tens to hundreds of thousands of errors per second.
I can imagine most consumers that do any sort of work with their computer would appreciate close to 100% stability when they need to get work done.
That's usually why no one that depends on their computers to work day in and day out overclocks their components. The marginal performance gains aren't worth the added unreliability and added power/heat/noise footprint.
The lack of adoption/demand for just ECC RAM by consumers would seem to be an argument in the opposing direction. (Yes, it’s not widely available currently, but I think it’s safe to safe that availability is driven by predictions about adoption given past market behavior.)
Who decided there is a lack of consumer demand? There is a lack of OEM demand for sure which is driven by the fact that most companies are willing to sell crap if it can save 1 cent per product. The average consumer does not even know this pb exists. Adding to that the artificial market seg by Intel which is absolutely stupid and the consummer actually can not buy a consummer CPU that supports ECC. The situation is then locked into a vicious circle where all the components have ridiculous premiums and lower volumes.
Consumers are not the customer. System integrators are the customer. They are motivated to minimize the number of distinct manufacturing targets. Consumers have no choice but to take what is offered.
