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What does EDAC mean here? I wasn't able to find a definition. My guess is "error detection and correction"?

Difference between it and ECC?


K0balt
EDAC is the concept, ECC is a family of algorithmic solutions in the service of the concept. Specific implementations of ECC are the engineering solution that implement the specific form of ECC in specific devices at the hardware or software level.

It’s confusing because EDAC and ECC seem to mean the same thing, but ECC is a term primarily used in memory integrity, where EDAC is a system level concept.

RealityVoid
That was my initial confusion as well. It means exactly what you guessed, "Error detection and correction". The term is also spelled out in the report. I asked Claude about it (caveat emptor) and it said EDAC is the correct name for the circuitry and implementation itself whereas ECC is the algorithm. Gemini said that EDAC is the general technique and ECC is one implementation variant. So, at this point, I'm not sure. They are used interchangeably (maybe wrongly so), and in this case, we're referring to, essentially, the same thing, with maybe some small differences in the details. In my professional life, almost always I referred to ECC. In the report, they were only using EDAC. I thought I'd maintain consistency with the report so I tried using EDAC as well.
Normal_gaussian
Large portions of this comment provides zero to negative value. You've quoted two LLMs and couched it in "caveat emptor" and "so I'm not sure". The rest of your comment has then mused over this data you do not trust using generalities ("my profession" are you a JS S/W eng? A chip design specialist at ARM? A security researcher?).

All of the value of your comment comes from the first sentence and the last two.

RealityVoid
Sheesh, tough crowd.
ImPostingOnHN
Feel free to consult LLMs, with all their downsides (like you needing to verify what they say, because it could be totally wrong).

What you're doing here is half the job: consulting an LLM and sharing the output without verifying whether it is true. You're then saying 'okay everyone else, finish my job for me, specifically the hard part of it (the verification), while I did the easy part (asking a magic 8 ball)'.

From this perspective, your comment could be viewed as disrespectful of others by asking them to finish your job, and of negative value because it could be totally hallucinated and false, and you didn't care enough about others to find out before posting it.

tl;dr: 'I asked an LLM and it said X' will likely, for the near future, be downvoted just like 'I flipped a coin and it said X'. You should be pretty confident that what you post is not false before posting it, regardless of how you came up with it.

dgacmu
The more correct and general answer is that:

- EDAC is a term that encompasses anything used to detect and correct errors. While this almost always involves redundancy of some sort, _how_ it is done is unspecified.

- The term ECC used stand-alone refers specifically to adding redundancy to data in the form of an error correcting code. But it is not a single algorithm - there are many ECC / FEC codes, from hamming codes used on small chunks of data such as data stored in RAM, to block codes like reed-solomon more commonly used on file storage data.

- The term ECC memory could really just mean "EDAC" memory, but in practice, error correcting codes are _the_ way you'd do this from a cost perspective, so it works out. I don't think most systems would do triple redundancy on just the RAM -- at that point you'd run an independent microcontroller with the RAM to get higher-level TMR.

Yokolos
EDAC is a general term for an error detection and correction system. It can encompass ECC memory or other solutions.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01419...

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