Intel is a big company, so during its many decades of activity there have been many Intel employees who have done a lot of good things for the progress of the computing industry, but there have been also too many Intel employees who have made horrible decisions which have caused millions of Intel customers to lose a large amount of money and time, which is impossible to evaluate, because in such cases there is not enough information to disambiguate the causes of various incidents between various kinds of hardware problems and software bugs.
The most damaging Intel decision was about the ECC memory, but there were also many others that are less impactful, e.g. the various ugly workarounds for the laziness of Microsoft of adding various necessary features to Windows, e.g. the System Management Mode or the Management Engine.
The problem with the ECC memory has been created by Intel from 1994 to 1995, when Intel has split their top line of CPUs into two branches, Pentium (the second generation of Pentium, @ 90 or 100 MHz) and Pentium Pro.
For more than a decade, since the introduction of the IBM PC, all compatible personal computers had implemented memory error detection, even if it was possible to use memory modules without error detection, if one did not care about the reliability of the computer.
With Pentium and Pentium Pro, Intel has decided to introduce a market segmentation feature and they have reserved the use of ECC memory for the "professional" Pentium Pro, while removing the support for memory error detection from the Triton chipsets made for the Pentium CPUs (at that time, before AMD integrated the memory controller, the memory controller was still a part of the external northbridge chip).
The successors of Pentium Pro have been rebranded as "Xeon" and they have continued for a long time to be the only Intel CPUs with support for ECC.
The so called "market segmentation", even if it is practiced by a large number of companies, is just a combination of fraud with blackmail, which should have been forbidden by law in most cases.
To introduce market segmentation, a company takes advantage of the fact that the majority of its customers are naive and they are not able to evaluate correctly the quality of a product that they purchase.
The company then uses this fact to extract much more money from the fewer customers who actually know how to evaluate the quality. For this, the company convinces the naive customers that a lower quality is good enough for them and then the company lowers by various means the quality of the products sold at a decent price, in order to able to request an overprice from the quality-aware customers, who are forced to pay, because they do not have an alternative, since the products at the right price do not have the right quality.
This scheme would not work in a competitive market, but when there are few competitors they usually follow the example of the first company which did that and they introduce the same market segmentation policy, because this will increase the profits for all.
Now, because AMD did not disable ECC in Ryzens, even if AMD has provided much worse software support for this feature than Intel (in the EDAC device drivers), at least until recently, Intel has been forced eventually to enable ECC in many models of Alder Lake and Raptor Lake.
Nevertheless, after many decades of lack of support in consumer CPUs, there is a lot of inertia to overcome in the availability of ECC.
Even if now it is easy to find Intel desktop CPUs with ECC support, the ECC support on motherboards requires the special workstation chipsets, so the socket LGA 1700 motherboards with ECC support are hard to find and they are either expensive or with underwhelming features.
All Intel CPUs for mobile applications (the U, P and H series) continue to lack ECC support. Only the HX series for laptops, which are desktop chips packaged in BGAs, have ECC support.
Previously, even AMD had implemented a market segmentation by disabling ECC in their laptop CPUs. That has changed in the Ryzen 6000 Rembrandt series, which have ECC support. However the ECC support remains theoretical, because until now no laptop manufacturer has introduced any laptop with an AMD mobile CPU and with ECC memory, so there is no competition yet for the Intel mobile workstations.
The most damaging Intel decision was about the ECC memory, but there were also many others that are less impactful, e.g. the various ugly workarounds for the laziness of Microsoft of adding various necessary features to Windows, e.g. the System Management Mode or the Management Engine.
The problem with the ECC memory has been created by Intel from 1994 to 1995, when Intel has split their top line of CPUs into two branches, Pentium (the second generation of Pentium, @ 90 or 100 MHz) and Pentium Pro.
For more than a decade, since the introduction of the IBM PC, all compatible personal computers had implemented memory error detection, even if it was possible to use memory modules without error detection, if one did not care about the reliability of the computer.
With Pentium and Pentium Pro, Intel has decided to introduce a market segmentation feature and they have reserved the use of ECC memory for the "professional" Pentium Pro, while removing the support for memory error detection from the Triton chipsets made for the Pentium CPUs (at that time, before AMD integrated the memory controller, the memory controller was still a part of the external northbridge chip).
The successors of Pentium Pro have been rebranded as "Xeon" and they have continued for a long time to be the only Intel CPUs with support for ECC.
The so called "market segmentation", even if it is practiced by a large number of companies, is just a combination of fraud with blackmail, which should have been forbidden by law in most cases.
To introduce market segmentation, a company takes advantage of the fact that the majority of its customers are naive and they are not able to evaluate correctly the quality of a product that they purchase.
The company then uses this fact to extract much more money from the fewer customers who actually know how to evaluate the quality. For this, the company convinces the naive customers that a lower quality is good enough for them and then the company lowers by various means the quality of the products sold at a decent price, in order to able to request an overprice from the quality-aware customers, who are forced to pay, because they do not have an alternative, since the products at the right price do not have the right quality.
This scheme would not work in a competitive market, but when there are few competitors they usually follow the example of the first company which did that and they introduce the same market segmentation policy, because this will increase the profits for all.
Now, because AMD did not disable ECC in Ryzens, even if AMD has provided much worse software support for this feature than Intel (in the EDAC device drivers), at least until recently, Intel has been forced eventually to enable ECC in many models of Alder Lake and Raptor Lake.
Nevertheless, after many decades of lack of support in consumer CPUs, there is a lot of inertia to overcome in the availability of ECC.
Even if now it is easy to find Intel desktop CPUs with ECC support, the ECC support on motherboards requires the special workstation chipsets, so the socket LGA 1700 motherboards with ECC support are hard to find and they are either expensive or with underwhelming features.
All Intel CPUs for mobile applications (the U, P and H series) continue to lack ECC support. Only the HX series for laptops, which are desktop chips packaged in BGAs, have ECC support.
Previously, even AMD had implemented a market segmentation by disabling ECC in their laptop CPUs. That has changed in the Ryzen 6000 Rembrandt series, which have ECC support. However the ECC support remains theoretical, because until now no laptop manufacturer has introduced any laptop with an AMD mobile CPU and with ECC memory, so there is no competition yet for the Intel mobile workstations.