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Comment by pedrocr | Hacker News Reader

I agree and it's one of the reasons it's much easier to go with AMD for cheap home servers/NAS (HP Microserver line is great for example) as Intel tends to reserve ECC for very expensive parts.

What doesn't seem easy is to get ECC in laptops. I don't think even traditionally business-focused lines have it (e.g., Thinkpads).

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Nowadays you can get ECC with intel for quite cheap: http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced/?s=t&MarketSegment=DT&E...

That's good to know. It seems the issue is actually motherboard support. Newegg shows a single intel motherboard with ECC and no AMD ones. I suppose the low-end server hardware (e.g., HP Microservers) just tend to be AMD so it's easiest to get a cheap AMD server with ECC than an Intel one. I had assumed it was an intel issue but apparently not.

It would be nice if the intel ultrabook standard started including ECC as well. One can dream...

On LGA1150 you need a C22x chipset for ECC support: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/server-chips...

Prices for these start about 3x higher than other boards, their choice is extremely limited, and availability even more so :/

Unfortunately while the CPUs themselves are quite reasonable, motherboards tend to be far more expensive and less available. I wonder how much of a markup Intel has on the server chipsets vs. desktop ones; it'd be interesting to know whether Intel or motherboard manufacturers are making bank on the boards.

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