Linus Torvalds has made it clear that he has not made a New Year's resolution to soften or mellow his criticism of Intel, which has often been a source of frustration for the Linux founder, in response to comments on the Linux kernel mailing list, Torvalds again lashed out at Intel for its lack of consumer support, especially for specialized PC memory.

His main problem is the lack of consumer support for error correcting code (ECC) memory. ECC RAM, found primarily in servers and workstations, has an additional chip on the module that is responsible for detecting and correcting memory errors on the fly. Scientific data collection and banking are two of the many areas that could benefit from ECC memory.

Error correction can benefit from speed, but that is not why we have not listed ECC modules in our roundup of the best RAM for gaming. It is because there is not much focus on ECC RAM in the consumer segment. Torvalds puts the blame entirely on Intel.

Torvalds responded to comments in a mailing list thread that AMD's latest Ryzen processors support ECC memory but have not validated it (i.e., it is up to motherboard manufacturers to determine support). One user on the mailing list angered Torvalds by commenting that "ECC is not really important" on Ryzen systems. [ECC is absolutely important, and the availability of ECC is very important because Intel has helped kill the entire ECC industry through terrible and vicious market fragmentation," Torvalds wrote.

"Go out and look for ECC DIMMs. Yes, perhaps entirely thanks to AMD, although things may have improved a bit recently, but that's exactly my point. Intel has done the entire industry and its users a disservice because of its vicious and misguided policies," Torvalds continued.

These are some of his better comments on the matter. Torvalds further opined that the arguments against supporting ECC memory in the consumer market "have always been complete and utter garbage."

Some of his arguments seem to be premised on security exploits such as Rowhammer targeting DRAM. For this reason, according to Torvalds, memory manufacturers use ECC internally

for economy and low power consumption.

"They are lying bastards. Let me point out again about Rowhammer, these bastards willingly sold broken hardware to consumers and claimed it was an 'attack,' even though such problems had already existed for several generations. How many times have bit flips like Rowhammer happened with actual loads that weren't attacks, just pure bad luck?" It's because Intel was pushing shit on the consumer."

In no uncertain terms, Torvalds puts the blame on Intel for the lack of widespread adoption of ECC memory in the consumer sector, saying the standard was "literally killed by Intel's bad policies."

The good news for Torvalds and those who share his views is that with the advent of DDR5, this issue becomes largely moot. This is because on-die ECC is built into the DDR5 standard; AMD's Zen 4 architecture will likely support DDR5, as will Intel's Alder Lake lineup.