Comment by temac

They did support ECC on some i3 simply because they did not bother to double the sku, however IIRC you need the server / WS S chipset to enable it. At which point just put an entry level Xeon on that.

In the absolute the cost of ECC everywhere would not be substantially greater than the prices we have now without. The current ECC prices are high because it is not broadly used, and not really the inverse. Consumer skip it because it is fucking hard to get ECC enable parts for S SKUs (or H / U) in the current situation, while there are plenty of non-ECC vendors and resellers, and something like at least 3 times the number of SKUs. And consumers have not been informed they are buying unreliable shit.