Not here to defend Intel (their decision to remove ECC support from X299 chipset pretty much tanked their own HEDT platform), but I often wonder how much of the current disregard of ECC is the fault of the system integrators.
As of now they would gladly ship configurations with single channel memory and under-par cooling to save a few bucks, while these cut corners could hurt performance by as much as 30% due to insufficient memory bandwidth and thermal throttling.
Even if ECC is available everywhere I doubt any OEM will use it without charging their users a premium. This is kind of what has been going on with AMD MSDT platforms: ECC support is in the CPU but many motherboard does not even implement the necessary memory traces to enable it, and software support is even messier to the point that most people can't be bothered with it.
This is a self-fulfilling issue; since Intel does not support ECC, ECC is not mainstream, so mainstream platforms don't care about ECC. It would cost motherboard manufacturers ~nothing to support this properly, so if it were accepted as a thing they would, and it would eventually be a requirement for newer RAM technologies. ECC should've been mandatory since about the DDR2 era, practically speaking. That it isn't is a collective failure of the computer industry, and Intel takes a big part of the blame.
At least I had no issues getting ECC to work on my Threadripper box, but sure, that's HEDT.
Maybe while both ECC and non-ECC are both being sold, but that would be a temporary situation. The goal would be to have non-ECC memory be effectively deprecated, so the next revision of the spec enforces ECC as a requirement.
As of now they would gladly ship configurations with single channel memory and under-par cooling to save a few bucks, while these cut corners could hurt performance by as much as 30% due to insufficient memory bandwidth and thermal throttling.
Even if ECC is available everywhere I doubt any OEM will use it without charging their users a premium. This is kind of what has been going on with AMD MSDT platforms: ECC support is in the CPU but many motherboard does not even implement the necessary memory traces to enable it, and software support is even messier to the point that most people can't be bothered with it.