Very few applications scale with cores. For the vast majority of people single core performance is all they care about, it's also cheaper. They don't need or want workstation gear.

I have come to doubt that single core or CPU performance in general, other than maybe specialty applications like CAD and some games, is all that noticeable for most computer users in the last decade. I can take relatively pedestrian users like my parents or my wife and put them in front of a decade old high end Haswell system or a brand new mega-$$$ threadripper/epyc and for almost all intents and purposes they don't notice a different. What they do notice is when things die. I'm sure consumer hardware might be OK for 2-3 years (maybe), but like for my parents, they're happier to keep using the same computer, and honestly the same Dell Precision system I gave them almost 10 years ago works great today, and I have a suspicion that the hardware, outside of maybe the SSD finally wearing out, will probably work right a decade from now too.

> Very few applications scale with cores

You mean like compilers and test suites ? Very few professional workloads don't parallelize well these days.

Compilers and test suits do scale (at least for C/C++ and Rust, which is what I work with). But I think the parent comment referred to consumer applications: games, word processing, light browsing, ...

(Though games these days scale better than they used to, but only up to a to a point.)

I find that most tools I write for my own use can be made to scale with cores, or run so fast that the overhead of starting threads is longer than the program runtime. But I write that in Rust which makes parallelism easy. If I wrote that code in C++ I would probably not bother with trying to parallelize.

But those tools aren't really compute bound anyway - you're not buying a workstation to do them, you're getting a consumer laptop or a tablet.

And that consumer device should have ECC! That's the whole discussion here.

It's confusing because a few comments up is "for the vast majority of people single core performance is all they care about, it's also cheaper" which is unrelated to ECC.

I think it's coherent -- it's an argument for why most people don't want to buy Workstation class products just to get ECC. (Prices scale with core count. Not linearly, but still.)

Test suites often don't scale, actually. Unit tests usually run single-threaded by default, and also relatively often have side effects on the system that mean they're unsafe to run in parallel. (Sure, sure, you could definitely argue the latter thing is a skill issue.)

In theory, do you need a single machine for any of that, or would it be cheaper to use a low-availability cloud cluster? Tests are totally independent, and builds probably parallel enough.

Only a small percentage of computer users are programmers.

There were several years where used cheese grater Mac Pros could be bought and upgraded for very cheap, and were still not too outdated. I only replaced my MacPro4,1 when the M1 mini came out, mainly cause of wattage.

I've had zero issues with AMD's consumer tier of non-WX Threadripper and Ryzen models, FWIW.

overblown? billions of users use consumer tier hardware just fine. i have servers at home with years of uptime without any ECC memory

But how much bit rot? You’ll never know.

If I don't know about it, then how does it affect me / why should I care? My home server does what it is supposed to do and has done so for a decade. If bit rot /bit flips in memory does not affect my day-to-day life I much prefer cheaper hardware.

I do hope the nuclear powerplant next door uses more fault tolerant hardware, though.

Eventually you might notice the pictures or other documents you were saving on your home server have artifacts, or no longer open. This is undesireable for most people using computer storage.

> I much prefer cheaper hardware.

The cost savings are modest; order of magnitude 12% for the DIMMs, and less elsewhere. Computers are already extremely cheap commodities.

12% for the DIMMs only, but with Intel you need Xeon and its accompanying motherboard for it. Someone said AMD "kinda" lets you do ECC on consumer hardware, not sure what the caveats are besides just being unbuffered.

Assuming that's more due to intentional market segmentation than actual cost, yeah I would pay 12% more for ECC. But I'm with the other guy on not valuing it a ton. I have backups which are needed regardless of bitrot, and even if those don't help, losing a photo isn't a huge deal for me.

> Someone said AMD "kinda" lets you do ECC on consumer hardware, not sure what the caveats are besides just being unbuffered.

That was me. It isn't "officially" supported by AMD, but it should work. You can enable EDAC monitoring in Linux and observe detected correction events happening.

> Assuming that's more due to intentional market segmentation than actual cost

That's the argument, yeah.

I'm more concerned how the Mac filesystems don't have payload checksums.

I hate my workstation desktop I assembled 15 years. It just doesn't break! I have no excuses to buy a new one (except for video card).