4 ms·

As you as you mean “slower than it was” then that statement holds mostly true. Your CPU, RAM and GPU should perform the same on day 1 and day 10000 as long as t

As you as you mean “slower than it was” then that statement holds mostly true. Your CPU, RAM and GPU should perform the same on day 1 and day 10000 as long as they are still functional. Any “degradation” won’t make them slower, just non functional. The complication in this comes from the SSD, where the flash cells have a feedback loop for operations such as erasing that can take longer as these cells degrade.

jokoon 6y ago
CPU have error correction, which will mitigate transistor aging and make the CPU work slowly instead of not at all. It will not "perform the same". At some point there is a noticeable slowdown, and even though Wirth's law is at work, it's not the entire story. Heat will also make any chip age faster. This article talks about aging under 5nm, but aging is already an issue above 5nm. Read the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration#Practical_implications_of_electromigration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration#Practical_imp... > The complication in this comes from the SSD I always experienced slowdowns on computer that did not have SSD. Software is not always the only problem.
- rcxdude 6y ago
  Error correction in CPUs is generally limited to the cache, and its incidence is recorded: if something had failed permanently such that the error correction path was being taken constantly, you would be able to record it. Absent a mechanism which reduces the clock speed of the CPU when it becomes unstable, there's no reasonable way in which failures in the CPU will result in it running slower. Such a mechanism doesn't generally exist: modern CPUs regulate their clock but only in response to a fixed power and temperature envelope. The recent iphone throttling is the only notable case where anything was done automatically in response to an unstable CPU, and that consisted of applying a tighter envelope if the system reset. This is reflected in the experiences of those who run older hardware with contemporary software: it generally still works just fine at the speed that it used to.
  - jokoon 6y ago
    From the article: > “For example, microprocessor degradation may lead to lower performance, necessitating a slowdown, but not necessary failures
    - rcxdude 6y ago
      It may be necessary for the micro to run slower in order to be stable, but to my knowledge no system for making that adjustment automatically exists in the vast majority of systems. The main problem being it's hard to detect. How do you tell if the CPU is on the margin of failing without a huge amount of extra circuitry? It can be hard enough to detect that it has had a fault. It's not due to lack of interest: such sensing approaches have been patented before, but don't seem to have made it out of the R&D lab.
      - jokoon 6y ago
        "to my knowledge" CPU technology is quite arcane, very high level, there are so many patents, IP money and a lot of secrecy involved, since CPU tech is quite a strategic one for geopolitical power. Do you work as an engineer at intel, ARM, AMD? On chip design? > How do you tell if the CPU is on the margin of failing It's not about failing, it's about error detection. Redundancy is a form of error detection. If several gates disagree on a result, they have to start again what they worked on. That's one simple form of error detection. CPU never really fail, they just slow down because gates generate more and more errors, requiring recalculation until they finally correct the detected error. An aged chip will just have more and more errors, that will slow it down. Which is the reason why old chip are slower, independently of software. Although a CPU that is very old will be very slow, or just crash the computer again and again that hardware-people will just toss the whole thing, since they're not really trained or taught to diagnose if it's the CPU, the RAM, the capacitors, the GPU, the motherboard, etc. In general they will tell their customers "it's not compatible with new software anymore". In the end, most CPUs get tossed out anyway. It's also a matter of planned obsolescence. Maintaining sales is vital, so having a product that a limited lifespan is important if manufacturers want to hold the market.
- thebruce87m 6y ago
  Someone else has addressed your other points, but for ECC: This will not detect an error in computation, only a bit flip in data. The current way to mitigate computation errors is to have two processors to detect an error in computation, or more to do a voting system if mere detection is not good enough. Since you cannot detect a computation error with a single CPU (without overhead somewhere, and thus lower performance), you can’t slow down to fix it. The ECC systems I have worked with can fix a 1 bit error and detect two or more bit errors. They do this by using an algorithm to convert the original data in to an output that is bigger than the original (e.g. 64 bytes is now 72 bytes). This output data does not make sense until passed through the reversing algorithm. So basically the overhead is zero since the memory controller is running the algorithm in hardware every time anyway, so no slow down.

jokoon 6y ago

CPU have error correction, which will mitigate transistor aging and make the CPU work slowly instead of not at all. It will not "perform the same". At some point there is a noticeable slowdown, and even though Wirth's law is at work, it's not the entire story. Heat will also make any chip age faster. This article talks about aging under 5nm, but aging is already an issue above 5nm. Read the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration#Practical_implications_of_electromigration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration#Practical_imp... > The complication in this comes from the SSD I always experienced slowdowns on computer that did not have SSD. Software is not always the only problem.

rcxdude 6y ago
Error correction in CPUs is generally limited to the cache, and its incidence is recorded: if something had failed permanently such that the error correction path was being taken constantly, you would be able to record it. Absent a mechanism which reduces the clock speed of the CPU when it becomes unstable, there's no reasonable way in which failures in the CPU will result in it running slower. Such a mechanism doesn't generally exist: modern CPUs regulate their clock but only in response to a fixed power and temperature envelope. The recent iphone throttling is the only notable case where anything was done automatically in response to an unstable CPU, and that consisted of applying a tighter envelope if the system reset. This is reflected in the experiences of those who run older hardware with contemporary software: it generally still works just fine at the speed that it used to.
- jokoon 6y ago
  From the article: > “For example, microprocessor degradation may lead to lower performance, necessitating a slowdown, but not necessary failures
  - rcxdude 6y ago
    It may be necessary for the micro to run slower in order to be stable, but to my knowledge no system for making that adjustment automatically exists in the vast majority of systems. The main problem being it's hard to detect. How do you tell if the CPU is on the margin of failing without a huge amount of extra circuitry? It can be hard enough to detect that it has had a fault. It's not due to lack of interest: such sensing approaches have been patented before, but don't seem to have made it out of the R&D lab.
    - jokoon 6y ago
      "to my knowledge" CPU technology is quite arcane, very high level, there are so many patents, IP money and a lot of secrecy involved, since CPU tech is quite a strategic one for geopolitical power. Do you work as an engineer at intel, ARM, AMD? On chip design? > How do you tell if the CPU is on the margin of failing It's not about failing, it's about error detection. Redundancy is a form of error detection. If several gates disagree on a result, they have to start again what they worked on. That's one simple form of error detection. CPU never really fail, they just slow down because gates generate more and more errors, requiring recalculation until they finally correct the detected error. An aged chip will just have more and more errors, that will slow it down. Which is the reason why old chip are slower, independently of software. Although a CPU that is very old will be very slow, or just crash the computer again and again that hardware-people will just toss the whole thing, since they're not really trained or taught to diagnose if it's the CPU, the RAM, the capacitors, the GPU, the motherboard, etc. In general they will tell their customers "it's not compatible with new software anymore". In the end, most CPUs get tossed out anyway. It's also a matter of planned obsolescence. Maintaining sales is vital, so having a product that a limited lifespan is important if manufacturers want to hold the market.
thebruce87m 6y ago
Someone else has addressed your other points, but for ECC: This will not detect an error in computation, only a bit flip in data. The current way to mitigate computation errors is to have two processors to detect an error in computation, or more to do a voting system if mere detection is not good enough. Since you cannot detect a computation error with a single CPU (without overhead somewhere, and thus lower performance), you can’t slow down to fix it. The ECC systems I have worked with can fix a 1 bit error and detect two or more bit errors. They do this by using an algorithm to convert the original data in to an output that is bigger than the original (e.g. 64 bytes is now 72 bytes). This output data does not make sense until passed through the reversing algorithm. So basically the overhead is zero since the memory controller is running the algorithm in hardware every time anyway, so no slow down.