3 ms·

i'm just struggling to find the link between capitalism and ECC memory.

versteegen 6y ago
Market segmentation.
eptcyka 6y ago
It's the act of maximizing profits by segmenting the market that creates artificially bad products that end up being the mainstream because of the price difference. If the companies responsible for making these decisions were optimizing just a tad bit more for practicality and usability rather than just profit, ECC would be the standard and that would be the end of that. Similar to how a lot of luxury and non-luxury cars will have seemingly essential and cheap equipment only available as part of an expensive options package - the cost of producing and installing the extra equipment is a mere fraction of the total package cost, a large majority will end up buying the package anyway (and 100% would if money was no object). One might argue that this practice is part and parcel of modern industrial markets, and is almost fair - prices are arbitrary and consumers get to pay for the value they get out of something, there is no optimal, moral way to determine what someone's margins should be, yadda yadda. In my opinion, usually the market will choose what are acceptable margins on a given product and/or service, but with 2 thousand dollar parking sensors and double-the-price ECC memory, with artifical segmentation, I'm paying not for the manufacturing and delivery of a product with a feature I want, but instead I'm having to pay for the opportunity of being able to have the product with the features I want + the manufacturing and delivery.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  > double-the-price ECC memory I was buying DDR4 RAM last week and the cost for a 4x8GB ECC+Registered DDR4 3200 RAM kit for a Xeon W build I’ll be doing soon was about 5% more expensive than for a kit of otherwise identical RAM kit for a non-ECC Core i7 rig - which also came with tacky RGB LED heatspreader - about $230 in total for each of them. The fact the pricing was so similar does make me wonder about the claims that non-ECC RAM is really ECC RAM just without the CPU/MMU being made aware of it - I think that’s possible if the RAM is already Buffered/Registered.
  - eptcyka 6y ago
    Oh wow, the prices have normalized a bit - about 18 months ago I had to pay about twice the money to get 64 gigabytes of ECC goodness.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    > The fact the pricing was so similar does make me wonder about the claims that non-ECC RAM is really ECC RAM just without the CPU/MMU being made aware of it - I think that’s possible if the RAM is already Buffered/Registered. Who claims that? And can't you just count the chips?
rcoveson 6y ago
There is no link. Segmentation of ECC support was an Intel decision which other chip manufactures have copied to a greater or lesser extent. For what it's worth, ECC support is spotty in Chinese-designed chips as well. Intel's decision could just as well have been made by a socialist government's regulatory body (in the form of "minimum requirements for consumer chip" legislation), or by a committee of decision makers in an employee-owned company. We may never know, because we only have 2-4 data points and they're all basically capitalist. Honestly, I'm not sure it was intended to be a serious comment. It could just as easily have been "...failure of human cognition and Obama."

Market segmentation.

It's the act of maximizing profits by segmenting the market that creates artificially bad products that end up being the mainstream because of the price difference. If the companies responsible for making these decisions were optimizing just a tad bit more for practicality and usability rather than just profit, ECC would be the standard and that would be the end of that. Similar to how a lot of luxury and non-luxury cars will have seemingly essential and cheap equipment only available as part of an expensive options package - the cost of producing and installing the extra equipment is a mere fraction of the total package cost, a large majority will end up buying the package anyway (and 100% would if money was no object). One might argue that this practice is part and parcel of modern industrial markets, and is almost fair - prices are arbitrary and consumers get to pay for the value they get out of something, there is no optimal, moral way to determine what someone's margins should be, yadda yadda. In my opinion, usually the market will choose what are acceptable margins on a given product and/or service, but with 2 thousand dollar parking sensors and double-the-price ECC memory, with artifical segmentation, I'm paying not for the manufacturing and delivery of a product with a feature I want, but instead I'm having to pay for the opportunity of being able to have the product with the features I want + the manufacturing and delivery.

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
> double-the-price ECC memory I was buying DDR4 RAM last week and the cost for a 4x8GB ECC+Registered DDR4 3200 RAM kit for a Xeon W build I’ll be doing soon was about 5% more expensive than for a kit of otherwise identical RAM kit for a non-ECC Core i7 rig - which also came with tacky RGB LED heatspreader - about $230 in total for each of them. The fact the pricing was so similar does make me wonder about the claims that non-ECC RAM is really ECC RAM just without the CPU/MMU being made aware of it - I think that’s possible if the RAM is already Buffered/Registered.
- eptcyka 6y ago
  Oh wow, the prices have normalized a bit - about 18 months ago I had to pay about twice the money to get 64 gigabytes of ECC goodness.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  > The fact the pricing was so similar does make me wonder about the claims that non-ECC RAM is really ECC RAM just without the CPU/MMU being made aware of it - I think that’s possible if the RAM is already Buffered/Registered. Who claims that? And can't you just count the chips?

rcoveson 6y ago

There is no link. Segmentation of ECC support was an Intel decision which other chip manufactures have copied to a greater or lesser extent. For what it's worth, ECC support is spotty in Chinese-designed chips as well. Intel's decision could just as well have been made by a socialist government's regulatory body (in the form of "minimum requirements for consumer chip" legislation), or by a committee of decision makers in an employee-owned company. We may never know, because we only have 2-4 data points and they're all basically capitalist. Honestly, I'm not sure it was intended to be a serious comment. It could just as easily have been "...failure of human cognition and Obama."