Comment by matthews3
At the silicon level, it is the same.
Each memory DIMM/stick is made up of multiple DRAM chip. ECC DIMMs have an extra chip for storing the error correcting parity data.
The bottleneck is with the chips and not the DIMMs. Chip fabs are expensive and time consuming, while making PCBs and placing components down onto them is much easier to get into.
Got it now, thanks!