However, cosmic rays would probably disturb the state of a RAM bit before
being strong enough to affect the voltage on a specific CPU leg.
Then such a disturbance would cause parity errors to happen.
A piece of history:
In the early 1980's, there was a serious problem of "soft errors" in
dynamic RAM chips. Turns out that the memory cells were sufficiently
small for a alpha particle, which passed nearby, to disturb their state.
The trend was alarming - 256Kb (that's 32K bytes) chips would have
suffered from a single bit soft error about once each quarter hour!
Turns out that the alpha particles came from radioactive residues in the
materials used to manufacture the DRAMs. Once better materials (with
no radioactivity at all) were being used, the problem practically
disappeared.
On Sun, 17 Jun 2001, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> But no way of actually knowing what triggered it?
>
> Then again, cosmic rays can, theoretically, drop the voltage on the
> specific CPU leg for just long enough to trigger the interrupt.
>
> Shachar
--- Omer
There is no IGLU Cabal. At least not officially, while Shlomi Fish is
looking!
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