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- Jul 16, 2010
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People like you are EXACTLY why it needs to be mandatory.
Personal attack much? People asking questions, like you, help others develop an understanding. Before this thread, I dismissed ECC as an unnecessary expense for most people. After looking at the numbers I'm a bit more concerned for my own data reliability. But I still don't believe I have the full picture. How often do failures matter? If I start getting failures, are they self-reporting due to a high amount of failures causing overall system instability, cluing me into a problem on my system?
How can you deny that Intel is using ECC to artifically segment the market for monetary reasons?
Intel undoubtedly segments the market for money reasons - Intel is a business. As a business, their primary purpose it to make money. Making money isn't bad in and of itself, especially if it's used to drive research and development. I don't personally know what Intel uses the money for, but you probably don't either.
If the government didn't regulate airline safety, you would always go with the cheapest airline because it was 'unlikely' your particular flight would crash.
Government regulation carries a hefty price - it is usually reserved for areas where there is a blatant mismatch in power (e.g. corporations vs people) and non-compliance represents a serious issue to the public's interest. While there definitely is a discrepancy in power (Intel vs you), data integrity is clearly a private interest. In terms of private interests, the governments involvement should be more limited - it should ensure that any contract or warranty, explicit or implicit, is honored. However, I don't want this to digress into a civics discussion.
Additionally, assumed liability is no straw man: companies across all industries actively try to avoid liability like a plague (because it can seriously hurt bottom lines). No company is going to assume liability for use of their device in an environment they don't control.
Memory having corruptions isn't a "fireball" - on top of that even an engine exploding isn't always the manufacturers fault. If it explodes because some one tried to attach an after-market turbo-charger, clearly the one who attached the after-market device is at fault. If your RAM has a high error rate because you undervolt it, it isn't the RAM manufacturers fault, nor is it their fault if your RAM fails due to inadequate cooling.
Intel is under no obligation to provide ECC - you have in no way demonstrated a clear obligation. The only obligation I can see you could reasonably argue is that an implicit warranty exists that data should last for the life of the device (which I still think is stretching it). Most warranties are for 90 days - some are for 1 year (and in rare cases, 5 years). There is no hard evidence that a user has a large chance of corruption in that time frame. Equally, there's no evidence that ECC provides additional security given the error rates of other consumer grade devices (motherboards, hard disks, power supplies).
The answer as to why isn't ECC used more is: a) Intel wants more profits and b) because the cost of implementing ECC is more than the loss of business due to customers switching brands due to data loss.
Once ARM starts to become a threat, you will probably see Intel flip on ECC and hyperthreading etc. AMD never gets any credit for not playing those games. It's just weird to see how many defend status quo segmentation with some faux stake in nothingness.
Intel isn't alone in not using ECC - most consumer grade devices don't use ECC (smart phones, tablets, video game systems). I doubt that using non-ECC is some sort of conspiracy to screw over consumers by every device manufacturer out there. Manufacturers will likely resort to ECC once error rates become high enough to cause a high rate of product failures costing them money due to RMAs and brand degradation. For instance, Intel uses Hamming codes on it's SSDs to protect against a high rate of bit errors in NAND.