The AmpHour #43 Cosmic Rays

[Rufus]

A missed point in the discussion is that while small geometry silicon circuits are much more likely to be 'flipped' they also present a much smaller target. The probability of a particular bit getting flipped has probably gone down significantly with the shrinking dimensions.

As for cosmic ray bit flipping in personal computers I doubt even 1% of flipped bits would show a noticeable effect. Would you notice a single pixel on this page being a bit off colour?

Flipped bit error rates should be easy enough to measure on PCs with ECC memory. I have a server motherboard with ECC. It also has a memory scrubbing option. I never found a way to inspect or log ECC activity.