Hi! > > Also notice that current cpus were not designed to work 300 years. > > When we have hw designed for 50 years+, we can start to worry. > > Indeed. CPU manufacturers don't seem to talk about it very much, and > searching for it with google on intel.com comes up with > > The failure rate and Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) data is not > currently available on our website. You may contact Intel? > Customer Support for this information. > > which seems to be just a fancy way of saying "we don't actually want to > talk about it". Probably not because it's actually all that bad, but > simply because people don't think about it, and there's no reason a CPU > manufacturer would *want* people to think about it. > > But if you wondered why server CPU's usually run at a lower frequency, > it's because of MTBF issues. I think a desktop CPU is usually specced to > run for 5 years (and that's expecting that it's turned off or at least > idle much of the time), while a server CPU is expected to last longer and > be active a much bigger percentage of time. > > ("Active" == "heat" == "more damage due to atom migration etc". Which is > part of why you're not supposed to overclock stuff: it may well work well > for you, but for all you know it will cut your expected CPU life by 90%).
Actually, when I talked with AMD, they told me that cpus should last 10 years *at their max specced temperature*... which is 95Celsius. So overclocking is not that evil, according to my info. (That would mean way more than 10 years if you use your cpu 'normally'.) But I guess capacitors from cpu power supply will hate you running cpu at 95C... Pavel -- (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek (cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/