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Big companies usually refresh all their hw on 3-5 year cycle, as older hw is too expensive to maintain (too much power use for the performance + increased repai

Big companies usually refresh all their hw on 3-5 year cycle, as older hw is too expensive to maintain (too much power use for the performance + increased repair costs). So in cases like this, it’s usually not swapping “good” hw, just ordering replacements from different vendor, when batch of hw reached their planned EOL.

jeffbee 6y ago
"Enterprises" do indeed dump hardware after 3-5 years, but not because it stopped being TCO-positive. It's just because they aren't sophisticated enough to own a computer without a warranty. Organizations who buy their computers by the megaton know that these machines are TCO-positive for 10+ years. There's a reason you can still get a Sandy Bridge in GCP or a Haswell in EC2.
- justapassenger 6y ago
  It depends how hot you run them. If you idle them 99% of the time, then yeah, warranty is main issue. But if you burn your cpu all day, power usage becomes significant expense. I guess you can get SB/HW from cloud vendors for few reasons: 1. Intel server CPU are usually generation behind customer ones, so they are little younger than one may think 2. They are used for workloads that require little of CPU power overall 3. They may have important customers that certified their software for those specific CPU, so they need to keep them in stock I don’t work at Google/Amazon, so I’m just speculating.
  - theevilsharpie 6y ago
    > I don’t work at Google/Amazon, so I’m just speculating. Since we're speculating, let me throw out another possibility: you aren't actually running on hardware that old. As long as the instruction set is compatible, the hypervisor can freely lie about what CPU you're running on, and GCP obfuscates the CPU model in their instances.
  - uluyol 6y ago
    > 1. Intel server CPU are usually generation behind customer ones, so they are little younger than one may think Yes but big customers get significantly earlier access than the general public. See how Intel shipped 110k+ units pre-launch: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16539/intel-ice-lake-xeon-scalable-shipments-to-date-30-customers-100k-units https://www.anandtech.com/show/16539/intel-ice-lake-xeon-sca...

jeffbee 6y ago

"Enterprises" do indeed dump hardware after 3-5 years, but not because it stopped being TCO-positive. It's just because they aren't sophisticated enough to own a computer without a warranty. Organizations who buy their computers by the megaton know that these machines are TCO-positive for 10+ years. There's a reason you can still get a Sandy Bridge in GCP or a Haswell in EC2.

justapassenger 6y ago
It depends how hot you run them. If you idle them 99% of the time, then yeah, warranty is main issue. But if you burn your cpu all day, power usage becomes significant expense. I guess you can get SB/HW from cloud vendors for few reasons: 1. Intel server CPU are usually generation behind customer ones, so they are little younger than one may think 2. They are used for workloads that require little of CPU power overall 3. They may have important customers that certified their software for those specific CPU, so they need to keep them in stock I don’t work at Google/Amazon, so I’m just speculating.
- theevilsharpie 6y ago
  > I don’t work at Google/Amazon, so I’m just speculating. Since we're speculating, let me throw out another possibility: you aren't actually running on hardware that old. As long as the instruction set is compatible, the hypervisor can freely lie about what CPU you're running on, and GCP obfuscates the CPU model in their instances.
- uluyol 6y ago
  > 1. Intel server CPU are usually generation behind customer ones, so they are little younger than one may think Yes but big customers get significantly earlier access than the general public. See how Intel shipped 110k+ units pre-launch: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16539/intel-ice-lake-xeon-scalable-shipments-to-date-30-customers-100k-units https://www.anandtech.com/show/16539/intel-ice-lake-xeon-sca...