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adrian_b • today at 5:12 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

Yes at that time Intel invented the market segmentation between "Pentium" for "consumers" and "Pentium Pro" for big spenders, and to make Pentium Pro more attractive they removed memory errors detection from the "Pentium" chipsets, which is the origin of the current state, when most non-server computers are very vulnerable to memory corruption and nobody can calculate how much money was lost by most computer owners during the last 3 decades, due to the greed of the Intel marketing, because nobody knows how many of the computer crashes or data loss cases that were typically attributed to unknown software bugs were actually caused by memory corruption.

Because this move was a money maker for all involved, all memory producers and also AMD followed immediately the Intel initiative. Memory modules without ECC would have never existed if adequate consumer protection laws had existed.