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Comment by ericfrederich | Hacker News Reader

Interesting thought, but kind of sounds like a conspiracy theory. Anything else to back it up?

Do you see every market segmentation as a conspiracy? If so, a conspiracy between whom?

Obviously ECC requires more resources and is therefore intrinsically more expensive. That does not preclude it from being used for market segmentation to get higher margins.

Same reason ECC is not supported on consumer processors from Intel. Here it would be almost trivial to add, but they don't.

Simple business strategy.

You're probably aware, but the desktop i3 does support ECC. Well, at least through the 7th generation. It looks like now that it's added 2 cores in the 8th generation, ECC has been dropped (NB: I didn't look at all models).

So, they're okay with it on consumer parts, as long as you're not looking to do anything resembling professional work I guess.

> ECC requires more resources and is therefore intrinsically more expensive

manufacturing cost is non-linear. Obviously intrinsically word gunk.

Can you expand on this? Memory already includes controller logic and adding ECC logic does not need a seperate process. All you need is more silicon real estate because of the extra bits needed for the ECC. Silicon is cheap.

In most previous generations all Core iX dice have had support for ECC, selectively disabled through fusing. Obviously, all internal busses and caches use error correction/detection independent of what the memory controller does.

> Obviously ECC requires more resources and is therefore intrinsically more expensive.

Technically. A fraction of a percent increase in die size for the memory transceivers, basically nothing for making and verifying checksums.

It's all business strategy.

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