Security News > 2021 > January > New year, new rant: Linus Torvalds rails at Intel for 'killing' the ECC industry

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has accused Intel of preventing widespread use of error-correcting memory and being "Instrumental in killing the whole ECC industry with its horribly bad market segmentation."

Cost is a factor but what riles Torvalds is that Intel has made ECC support a feature of its Xeon range, aimed at servers and high-end workstations, and does not support it in other ranges such as the Core series.

"Intel has been detrimental to the whole industry and to users because of their bad and misguided policies wrt ECC. Seriously. And if you don't believe me, then just look at multiple generations of rowhammer, where each time Intel and memory manufacturers bleated about how it's going to be fixed next time... And yes, that was - again - entirely about the misguided and arse-backwards policy of 'consumers don't need ECC', which made the market for ECC memory go away."

"The arguments against ECC were always complete and utter garbage. Now even the memory manufacturers are starting to do ECC internally because they finally owned up to the fact that they absolutely have to," said Torvalds.

Intel's marketing strategy is perhaps now working against it as ECC could become a selling point for AMD, though ECC memory requires support from both motherboard and CPU. "Intel's marketing antics meant that there was a pent up demand for alternatives. Obviously the ARM people would have loved to fill that demand, but right now it's AMD that stepped up instead," Torvalds said.

Intel has sent us a statement: "Intel supports and validates ECC on products where this feature is recommended by the industry. The industry has defined that ECC memory is most important for data integrity with servers and workstations where Intel supports it with Intel Xeon processors." .

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