Comment by marcan_42
4 years ago
Intel's lower end workstation chips are the same silicon, and thus the same manufacturing cost, as their desktop chips. They just artificially disable features like ECC for product segmentation. It is unconscionable that something as essential as ECC is crippled out of the consumer line-up.
Except that the memory chips and motherboards also need to support ECC
ECC costs $0 to support in motherboards (8 extra traces per DIMM slot; traces are free). Memory is where the consumer gets to choose whether to spend extra on ECC or not. There is absolutely no reason why consumers should be forced to pay extra for a CPU to get ECC when they are literally getting the same piece of silicon.
It's odd how indifferent you are being about the energy costs of ECC. Memory now dominates the energy story of many systems. Filling an x86 cache line from DDR4 costs 1000x as much energy as a double-precision multiplication operation. ECC memory costs 12.5% more energy. That's a big, big difference.
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