[graemep]

> ECC RAM is not needed for every application and mandating it for every gaming rig and machine used to run Chrome will just increase prices unnecessarily.

The price increase will be very small if manufacturers are no longer able to segment the market to make a higher margin on those who need it. No one wants even games or web browsers to crash randomly.

> If they want to eat that cost, it should be up to them.

They need to be given the choice. Most people do not know they even have the choice, and they are not offered it at a reasonable price.

A cost to people in general is a cost to society.

[procaryote]

Without quantifying the cost to society that someone's web-browser crashes sometimes, it's hard to make a rational case that this issue is so dire that it needs specific regulation.

I'm not sure making it illegal to sell consumer grade hardware is the boon for the people you imagine

[markonen]

Crash is the best-case outcome for a browser bit flip. Here's bitsquatting:

https://ripe92.ripe.net/programme/meeting-plan/sessions/112/...

[etbe]

No-one ever proposed making non-ECC RAM illegal, that's a straw-man.

Restricting risky items is standard practice for all governments. All the "use by" dates on food etc are from government regulation. The current experiments with "raw milk" shows that you can get away with flouting food safety regulations and not have immediate problems.

[gruez]

>The price increase will be very small if manufacturers are no longer able to segment the market to make a higher margin on those who need it.

AMD doesn't have this segmentation. Where's the hoard of people building systems with ECC ram? At best you have a few people on HN saying they're doing it, but in practice nobody actually does it.

[wahern]

AMD does segment. Only their EPYC, Pro, and some embedded models officially support ECC. Many other AMD chips have unofficial support, but if you care about data integrity, it feels like a gamble. You have to rely on suspect motherboard support and generally rely on gossip about what works well and what doesn't.

[wmf]

ECC UDIMMs are crazy expensive, presumably because they don't have economy of scale. Mandating ECC would solve that.

[sdsdssweew213]

Even before current RAM price craziness ECC UDIMM's were hard to find, and often more expensive than non-ECC. I was lucky to grab 128GB for similar price to non-ECC a few years back.

More people would use them, if they were available. RDIMM's do not work on normal consumer boards, so obviously people won't be using them.