Intel pretty much wants people to buy Xeons to get ECC, though they do currently have a series of industrial Atom cpus (an octa-core atom, in fact) that does support ECC. But it's designed for use in routers more than as a server. Even with 8 cores it isn't very fast. The ECC-capable i3 a few years ago was actually a bit of a mistake. However, now that AMD's consumer chips not only have unlocked multipliers, but are also ECC-capable (the mobo has to support it too of course)... that may prompt Intel to put the feature back into its consumer chips.
It's one of those artificial distinctions Intel uses to differentiate between its consumer chips and its more expensive Xeons. -Matt
