Why? Intel making and keeping it workstation/Xeon-exclusive for a premium for too long. And AMD is still playing along not forcing the issue with their weird "yeah, Zen supports it, but your mainboard may or may not, no idea, don't care, do your own research" stance. These days it's a chicken and egg problem re: price and availability and demand. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29838403

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m000 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe it's high time for some regulation?

E.g. EU enforced mandatory USB-C charging from 2025, and pushes for ending production of combustion engine cars by 2035. Why not just make ECC RAM mandatory in new computers starting e.g. from 2030?

AMD is already one step away from being compliant. So, it's not an outlandish requirement. And regulating will also force Intel to cut their BS, or risk losing the market.

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funcDropShadow 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

OMG no. Politician have no business making technological decisions. They make it harder to innovate, i.e. to invent the next generation of ECC with a different name.

	▲	m000 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I would argue that in the present conditions, regulation can actually foster and guide real innovation. With no regulations in place, companies would rather innovate in profit extraction rather improving technology. And if they have enough market capture, they may actually prefer to not innovate, if that would hurt profits.
	▲	cestith 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		ECC is like Ethernet. The name doesn’t have to change for the technology to update.
	▲	saagarjha 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Politicians don’t have to be dumb.

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free652 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Cost. You are about to making computers 10-20% more expensive.

Computers also aren't used much these days, and phones and tables don't have ECC

	▲	m000 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		ECC has only 10-15% more transistor count. So you're only making one component of the computer 15% more expensive. This should have been a non-brainer, at least before the recent DRAM price hikes. Also, while computers may not be used much for cosmic rays to be a risk factor, but they're still susceptible to rowhammer-style attacks, which ECC memory makes much harder. Finally, if you account for the current performance loss due to rowhammer counter-measures, the extra cost of ECC memory is partially offset.

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Helmut10001 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks for the details. I agree and had the same experience, trying to figure out if an AMB motherboard supports ECC or not. It is almost impossible to know ahead of trying it. At least we have ZFS now for parity checks on cold storage.