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Comment by codinghorror | Hacker News Reader

yeah I was noticing this, AMD is much more ECC friendly whereas Intel segments their markets hard by arbitrarily disallowing ECC platform use on common consumer (read: not-Xeon) CPUs. Unfortunately AMD is still quite a bit slower than Intel these days, but if you are doing work that is GPU rather than CPU intensive it might not matter.

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Even then, not all MBs support it... Most of the higher end Asus boards do, with AMD CPUs. The difference in power usage is pretty significant... Going from an FX-8350 to an i7-4790K was a significant power/heat improvement, for a faster CPU. The i3-5010U in my htpc is pretty awesome for what it does as well.

It really depends on the tasks if you NEED it... I wouldn't to a byo nas ever again... I would suggest that a lot of workloads don't need it.

That said, the additional cost should be nominal at this point, and I don't quite get why it isn't standard. It's like the coprocessors in the early 90's eventually became a critical integrated piece.

> disallowing ECC platform use on common consumer (read: not-Xeon) CPUs

this hasn't really been true since Haswell. Now even low-end Celerons and Pentiums support it.

One may suspect that some Celeron/Pentium/i3 SKUs support ECC just so that Intel doesn't have to manage low-volume very-low-end E3 SKUs. And then you run into the fact that the cheapest server motherboard is double the price of a cheap desktop one.

From what I can tell, some Celeron/Pentium/i3 SKUs support it because AMD was killing Intel in certain NAS applications thanks to the fact that their low-end chips had ECC.

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