Intel Enables ECC Memory on Consumer Alder Lake CPUs

“"12th Generation Core processors support ECC when paired with W680 platforms. In fact, even enthusiast-grade Core i9-12900K gains ECC support when paired with W680." - Intel spokesperson.” This is a bit confusing: why single out the i9-12900K? The way that sentence follows the first, it seems that it is the only CPU that will gain ECC support.

What a nice surprise in the wake of the Linus Torvalds discussion 2 days ago:

I *detest* the crazy industry politics that made ECC memory so “special”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33224680

(260 points, 205 comments)

Needs a relatively rare and expensive W680 board to work. I’ve looked for them. Rare and hard to actually find one for sale, especially in ITX[0]. In past generations, Core i3s also had official ECC support with certain workstation boards (though not consistently - there is at least one generation where the i3 did not support ECC in recent years).

[0] If it was mATX or ATX, I’d just use a non-APU Ryzen with an ASRock AM4 board - they had the most consistent ECC support in the AM4 socket, though are completely lacking it in AM5. This is the route I eventually went.

This is great news for cheaper fault tolerant computers.

Hopefully, mobile CPUs next for both Intel and AMD.