Torvalds takes the bold position that the lack of ECC RAM in consumer technology is Intel's fault due to the company's policy of artificial market segmentation. Intel has a vested interest in pushing deeper-pocketed businesses toward its more expensive—and profitable—server-grade CPUs rather than letting those entities effectively use the necessarily lower-margin consumer parts.
Removing support for ECC RAM from CPUs that aren't targeted directly at the server world is one of the ways Intel has kept those markets strongly segmented. Torvalds' argument here is that Intel's refusal to support ECC RAM in its consumer-targeted parts—along with its de facto near-monopoly in that space—is the real reason that ECC is nearly unavailable outside the server space.
The usual argument around why ECC isn't present in consumer tech revolves around cost, but we suspect Torvalds has the right of it here. Despite ECC RAM being essentially a hard-to-find specialty part, it typically only costs about 20 percent more per DIMM than non-ECC does at retail. The real problem is that without motherboards and CPUs which support it, it won't do you any good.
