[GTALUG] Linus blaming Intel for lack of ECC in consumer systems

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Nicholas Krause via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| The other two that annoy me are trying to lock down the number of PCI-E
| lanes or amount of memory. At least AMD fixed that with Threadripper
| Pro. Intel really needs to stop letting their marketing team create
| artificial limits in the product stack.

If the vendor chooses to segment their market by leaving out zero-cost 
features for the lower priced product, that's a demonstration of monopoly 
power in the market.

Intel has done that a lot.

There is a plausible excuse in some cases.  If all the cost is in 
engineering and not in manufacturing, it may make sense to only recoup the 
engineering costs from those who need it.

AMD, when it has been the underdog, has often thrown a lot of features in 
without extra charge.  This has sometimes appeared to drive Intel to move 
broadly provide the feature (i.e. when Intel appeared to be threatened 
by competition with AMD).

An example that irked me was virtualization hardware.  For the first few 
years, Intel only provided the feature on an odd subset of chips that were 
expensive.  Whenever you were considering a system, you had to consult the 
spec sheet for the CPU.  AMD provided it in all new processors after a 
they had engineered it.

Other examples that come to mind:

- Instructions to accelerate cryptography (eg. AES).

- PCI lanes, as Nicholas mentioned.

- physical address bits leaving the CPU bus

- 64-bit mode on x86

Interestingly, there are examples of the opposite behaviour that also
indicate to me monopoly power.

- Intel engineered a fairly powerful and intricate MMU for the 80286.
  They essentially forced all customers to pay for it, even though
  almost nobody used it during the service life of the processors
  bought in the first years.

  Motorola spent very roughly the same amount of silicon to implement
  a much more elegant 32-bit processor (the mc68000).

- Intel, a generation later, made customers buy a 32-bit processor
  (the 80386) when all that they'd use was the 16-bit subset.

In both those cases, the evidence is muddied because it was
Microsoft's monopoly behaviour that left hardware capability unused.

Famously, it was the latent power of the 80386 which incentivized
Linus to produce Linux.

In general, UNIX could and did exploit both the MMU of the 286 and the
32-bit architecture of the 386 long before Microsoft software.

| My predication is if ECC were
| more mainstream actually prices for it would probably stop being 2-3x
| or even more like they are currently.

ECC is generally provided by one extra bit per byte of memory.  So the 
cost premium should be no more than a factor of 9/8.  It should be even 
less since the cost of the board should not increase by that much, only 
the RAM.

| At least AMD tries their best to not limit the stack if possible for
| example board compatibility is far better so long as you flash a new
| BIOs for the next generation chips and even listened when users
| wanted more support but they were going to stop first/second generation
| Ryzen if I recall correctly with new chips,

I imagine that they are incentivized into this behaviour by their market 
position.

There is a pattern of underdogs changing if they become dominant.

It's not driven by morality, it's driven by game theory.

That's why anti-trust enforcement is so important for healthy free 
markets.  Something that has faded away in the last fifty years.