Hacker News Reader

Comment by flyinglizard | Hacker News Reader

I admit to only being in this industry for three decades now, and only designing and implementing the thermal/power control algo of an AI chip family for three years in that time, but it's the first time I hear of chips "wearing under high intensity use".

View on HN

Chips absolutely do wear out. Dopants electromigrate and higher temperatures make it faster. Discrete components like capacitors also tend to fail over time.

Is it going to be that significant though? No idea.

Depends on the design, and how hard you push it.

Just ask Intel what happened to 14th gen.

It's not normally an issue, but the edge cases can be very sharp. Otherwise, the bigger concern is the hardware becoming obsolete because of new generations being significantly more power efficient. Over a few years, the power+cooling+location bill of a high end CPU running at 90% utilization can cost more than the CPU itself.

Honestly it depends on a whole lot. If they are running 'very' hot, yea they burn out faster. If they have lots of cooling and heating cycles, yea, they wear out faster.

But with that said machines that run at a pretty constant thermal load within range of their capacitors can run a very long time.

thanks for that comment. I know absolutely nothing about chip designs, but i too was under the assumption that chips, like anything, wear out. And the more you use them, the more they do.

Is the wear so small that it’s simply negligible ?

As long as you keep temperatures and currents in check, there's no reason for a chip under load to fare worse than an idle chip. Eventually, maybe, but not in the 5-10 year lifespan expected of semiconductors.

Wasn't there a phenomenon with the GPUs being retired from crypto mining operations being basically cooked after a couple of years. Likely because they weren't keeping temperatures in check and just pushing the cards to their limits.

People pay less for used crypto-mined GPUs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com