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Comment by Arcuru | Hacker News Reader

> PS. And yes, my system is all set up for ECC - except I built it during the early days of COVID when there wasn't any ECC memory available at any sane prices.

How much was ECC ram at that point? Linus is incredibly wealthy and was building a machine that would be used to gate Linux releases, so I'm very curious how much was not "sane" for his use case.

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When I last looked DDR4 ECC UDIMMs were 2x the price of non-ECC UDIMMs of the same capacity.

This feels very wrong when the only difference is one additional chip that in terms of material only should increase the BOM price about 12.5% (going from 8->9 memory chips).

Maybe it is a volume issue - not enough are produced to benefit from economies of scale in the same way

But the chips are identical AND PCBs are compatible! I've seen many non-ECC modules with just one chip not soldered on. Unbuffered, of course.

It's 3-5 orders difference in the volume (and most of the time people buy high capacity modules) and ECC errors makes very obvious the need of replacing the module, while unregistered errors on non-ECC modules are just other 'something gone wrong' type and couldn't be diagnosed easily.

Also, onr of the primary markets for ECC UDIMMs are server/pro-workstation, thia alone.adds at least 10%

> How much was ECC ram at that point? Linus is incredibly wealthy...

I don't think Linus likes wasting money for the sake of wasting it.

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