Comment by hengheng | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hengheng | Hacker News Reader

I don't even hate this as much as I should. I showed the proper amount of outrage when BMW decided that heated seats should become a subscription, but this time I don't.

Any time that a specific feature brings a lot of value for a small crowd, it's bad business to commoditze it. It's how ECC memory kept being restricted to Xeons, and how hotels were able to charge for Wi-Fi back in the day. Majority of people didnt really need it, but the ones that do will insist.

But here's the thing: those people that absolutely rely on that feature will pay such ludicrous amounts that it subsidizes the product for everyone else. Heck, this one is big enough for Intel to create a sales channel and launch a product for it. That's $50M out the gate. They expect returns that change the bottom line, and significantly so.

Only question is whether the feature in question is a seat heater or ECC memory. If it's something that basically everybody will want, it's rent-seeking. But by the looks of it, I'm not going to unlock this on my parent's computer, so well done Intel?

While you are right in principle, the example with the ECC memory is not really appropriate.

The case with the ECC memory, which has been created by Intel when they have segmented the market between Pentium and Pentium Pro, is an example of a market segmentation technique where the vendor brainwashes the naive part of their customers to believe that they do not need a certain feature and that they might get cheaper products without that feature, but in fact the vendor sells the products with the disabled feature at the same price as before, to the naive customers, while using the fact that they disable the feature wanted by the experienced customers as a means of extortion to force the latter to pay much more money for the non-crippled products.

ECC is a feature that should have been mandatory by law on any computer, at least on all models where the memory is not soldered, but on modules inserted in sockets.

If there is no ECC, that guarantees that the computer will make mistakes from time to time. Even if the consequences of computer errors can have very different costs, depending on the application, nobody needs a computer that will make mistakes.

Even for someone who uses a computer only for games or for watching movies, so that a computer error should have very little importance, the lack of ECC still introduces a very small risk that, if the user is not careful to keep backup copies, some actions like copying some game assets or movies could produce corrupt files.

For someone who uses a computer creatively, the risk of computer errors can become non-negligible.

I think almost all problems with my computers so far have been bad memory or OCZ SSDs. But the performance hit you take for games and some other things is also very real and big. The very best DDR4 ECC memory on the market is DDR4-3600 CL16-19-19-39, which a) is not a good bin to start with, almost certainly with bad tertiary timings and b) costs more than twice as much as equivalent non-ECC.

Well sure, but that's because there's little demand for fast ecc memory by the gaming crowd due to the aforementioned market segmentation. There's no substantial limitation on ddr speed due to ECC itself.

That's just more market segmentation. If Intel had smartly made ECC a standard feature, we'd just have high speed ECC kits with good timings aimed at enthusiasts. There's no technical limitation on ECC that stops you from running the chips fast at increased voltage.

> OCZ

Wow that's a name I haven't heard in a LONG time...

Is there a name for the phenomenon where you don't hear about something for years, but you don't notice until it's mentioned, and suddenly you go "Wait...what happened to them?"

I'm fairly sure I had a 128 GB OCZ SSD back in the day.

I had a couple of OCZ drives. They were pretty flaky and unreliable. The Intel X25–M drives were really the first production ready consumer drives that I ever used. I still have one going to this day 13 years later. My Intel hardware in general has been as bulletproof as hardware gets. I actually believe Intel is underrated and underappreciated. Their quality assurance while not perfect, is the best. My current system is 100% Intel and Samsung.

The industry successfully made you think that computer reliability is optional and reserved for professionals and higher echelons only.

Indeed, well done Intel.

Empirically that's true, though. Consumers don't seem to care if their machine glitches a few times a year due to memory, especially when their software crashes more often.

Unless it corrupts the file you're working on.

For me, regardless of the knowledge level of the user, their time and files are priceless. As a result, the device they use should be reliable.

Of course, a faultless system is unimaginable, but I don't think that multi-year uptime our servers afford should be reserved to these higher end systems.

Even Windows is stable enough to be run for years without major problems, excluding the update & reboot cycles. Hence, I think that every user deserves a system which at least has ECC memory.

If we give consumers Machine Check, SMART, thermal monitoring/throttling, Persistent storage (HDD/SSD) error correction and other goodies, we can give them ECC. It should be a non-issue. Having more ECC RAM around will bring the prices down, too.

Gamers will say that ECC will add latency. They can disable it, or maybe industry will evolve to provide non-ECC systems at a premium for that 2% speed advantage.

I'll vote for an enable/disable switch for ECC, though.

Intel and other players offer in-line ECC which interleaves the ECC data with regular data, as such working on regular DRAM configs.

However: in-band ECC is only enabled for Alder Lake on embedded and chromeOS systems. Not available in the SKUs for regular Windows laptop/desktop use.

I know it's possible to obtain ECC by sacrificing your RAM capacity. Tesla cards also does this in previous generations.

Can I use it with my desktop/laptop? No.

So, we're at the same place still.

Possibility doesn't matter when the consumer can't reach it.

It is enabled on Alder Lake chromebooks. But locked out of Windows laptops by intel.

I think the hypothetical gamers from your post would be wrong. AFAIK ECC should, at most, add an insignificant amount of latency into the memory controller. It doesn't add any to the actual memory transactions because the extra bits move in parallel. Registered memory will add latency, but that's a different technology that just tends to be paired with ECC.

You may be right. I did no latency comparisons for these systems. As long as the ECC is handled in the memory controller and not offloaded to the CPU, it will be completely transparent to everything on the platform sans the machine check subsystem, which will log and report these errors in the first place.

I look forward to when industry takes this logic further, and requires an additional "business" license if their analytics detect your vehicle use exceeds allowed "personal/family" parameters.

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