Do single event upsets ever effect normal computing?

Question

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

Answer 1

> CPUs and GPUs must have a chance to experience these single event upsets

Yes, CPUs, GPUs and all electronics can experience SEUs. It is more common in the memory component (as the memory is often the bulk of the space in these chips).

> Why would FPGAs be more susceptible to SEUs than CPUs?

They aren’t by design. It’s just that SEUs are very common in space so using CPUs and GPUs is error prone. They are just not designed to handle lots of SEUs. So you need redundancy. At the same time, its not financially worth it to make a custom chip with all this redundancy, so people opt for FPGAs. You can fill the FPGA up with multiple copies of the same logic and have them ‘vote’ so an error in 1 is nullified.

> If I’m writing a Python script and I set a boolean to False, what’s the probability it gets set to True instead?

The chances of these happening on earth are both really really small. But not zero as you said with the case of the Super Mario 64 speedrunner. A nintendo 64 wouldn’t have any protection against that. But in modern systems if an SEU happens on say the system’s main memory, error correcting codes would catch and fix it. So that would further reduce the chances that a user would even know an SEU happened.