Funniest Intel fake I ever saw this:
Intel had a demo booth at at computer covention where they ... ta da ... were demonstrating the latest whatever. I peered inside the computers and had a good chuckle. This was obviously run by the marketing guys on the cheap because the "intel inside" ... was actually and AMD chip.
A long, long time ago, Compaq was demoing some gigantic new server which had redundant, hot swappable everything. As the presenter mentioned that you could simply pull out a DIMM on the fly, my friend reached in and did so, which powered off the machine completely.
Probably the most stressful job in the world is giving high-profile tech demo's...
Funny anecdote, but does "hot swap" necessarily mean "yank out without warning"? My understanding is that you might need to tell the kernel that you are going to yank out a component before doing so. Similarly after adding in a component you might have to poke the kernel and say "hey, new stuff here" before you can use it.
Still, I suspect it was probably designed to handle unexpected 1-bit errors and, like you're saying, allow for replacing RAM modules with the cooperation of the OS.
