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Comment by tacticus | Hacker News Reader

There really is no good reason intel keep removing this from the consumer cpus.

Sure there is - they cut the feature, and people still keep buying their CPUs in preference to the AMD ones which retain it. Since people obviously prefer speed to data integrity, why would Intel do anything different?

I always used AMD cpus on my dekstops, so that's probably why I didn't even notice it.

The last time I really looked into this stuff there was non-ECC, ECC and Rambus for servers.

Market segmentation.

You can segment on anything, if you want, the question is whether ECC should be a standard in all computers. It probably should be.

ECC does come at a cost of raw performance though.

From a marketing perspective it might not be a good idea to introduce a feature that would cause performance regressions in a new product.

What cost is there? This benchmark shows almost the same performance for ECC memory: http://www.techspot.com/article/845-ddr3-ram-vs-ecc-memory/

There are all sorts of things that "should" be standard on all computers, but until the average consumer (non-technical, not HN reading) starts saying "I got to get me some ECC memory" it's not going to be something Intel cares about.

Market segmentation is a good thing. The minority of people that need workstation/server -level reliability pay a premium, while the average consumer gets to pay less. If they abandoned this practice, the typical consumer would pay a lot more.

my guess is that the ECC aspect is really a hit or miss on the waffer fabrication, that's why they have such a huge pool of the market without it. also that is why intel has 200 models of each CPU. they waste nothing that cames out of the oven there.

There really isn't a big price difference between an i7 and an E3. Most consumers don't need ECC memory. So, leave it out and charge less. If you need it, get the Xeon.

I disagree. The sheer volume of data being pushed these days even by consumer computers is enough to be occasionally affected by a bit flip. ECC is used in the cache memory found on the CPU itself, so it's been important at that level for a long time even on consumer products.

It's amazing that after rowhammer people still think this.

Many server vendors are dropping ecc as the performance hit isn't worth the additional reliability in many cases. I don't see the point of ecc today for most applications also...

> Many server vendors are dropping ecc as the performance hit isn't worth the additional reliability in many cases.

Bullshit on both counts. (even the low-end Lenovo, HP and Dell servers I see sometimes on Slickdeals still have ECC, so what brands are you even talking about?)

Bullshit on both counts

Hey, how about keeping it civil and polite? It's been pretty good here for the last year, following a relentless drive to call out bad behaviour. It'd be a shame to see it backslide.

How is his statement not civil and polite?

Call a spade a spade, etc.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the idiom "calling bullshit" but I'm pretty confident it doesn't mean what you think it means.

It is an old enough expression that an urban dictionary reference shouldn't be necessary, but here you go:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=I+call+bullsh...

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the idiom "calling bullshit"

I am familiar with it and, to me, it's rude. I might say it to a friend if we're just bantering, but I'd never say it to a colleague. Clearly, I'm in the minority here.

Troll? ECC is only going to become more important as memory sizes grow. 256 GB isn't rare in a multi socket server and I cannot phantom that without ECC.

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