Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mywittyname 1991 days ago
The market killed ECC for consumers. It used to be widely available to desktop class hardware (I used to have some), but it was slower and more expensive than non-ECC RAM. None of the marketing-types made a good case for why normal people should pay more money for less-performant hardware, so the market disappeared.

Even the security issues only meaningfully impact servers.

People like Linus can buy server-class hardware if ECC is so important to them.

3 comments

The 'market' was influenced by two things. 1. Intel using ECC to segment consumer/server offerings. 2. Even when AMD supported ECC (officially or unofficially) on consumer products, consumers voted with their wallets with a mix of ignorance.

ECC ram should be more expensive as you're paying for more bits, and marginally slower as you're comparing stored with computed. If consumers don't value their data (they say they do but don't act accordingly), bit errors is what we get.

I do my job on a company laptop, if it were my own company I'd use an AMD desktop with ECC.

Old Sunblade desktops have a jumper switch where you can use either ECC or non-ECC ram.
> so the market disappeared.

So your claim is that it has nothing to do with Intel's product segmentation strategy?