I just read about [single event upsets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset) and it’s pretty fascinating. One thing that got me was that a speedrunner of Super Mario 64 experienced a single event upset.
So that leads me to believe that commercial electronics and regular CPUs and GPUs must have a chance to experience these single event upsets. When I research it, there’s only discussion on how it affects space electronics and FPGAs. But there’s gotta be a chance it affects my normal laptop, right? Why would FPGAs be more susceptible to SEUs than CPUs?
If I’m writing a Python script and I set a boolean to False, what’s the probability it gets set to True instead? If I’m logging into a website, what’s the possibility that the server side misinterprets my input? If it can affect an N64 in someone’s living room, there’s gotta be a non-zero chance, right?
In: Engineering
>When I research it, there’s only discussion on how it affects space electronics and FPGAs.
Space has 2 reasons to deal with it. The first is obviously that your equipment is costly and crucial so errors can be devastaging. And the other is cosmic background radiation which gets more intense if you leave the protective atmospheric shield of earth. So there is simply more radiation and thus a higher than usual chance of that happening in the first place.
Also even True and False in Python are likely not just 1 bit values so changing one bit might not have the effect of inverting it. And in terms of N64s. The earlier the console the more likely they tried to tickle out as much performance as possible with the least material, so it’s way more likely that at some points they went “fingers crossed that will not break most of the time”. I mean that’s literally a problem you could solve with a reset button or stuff like that. Not because it works, but because it’s unlikely to replicate.
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