3 ms·

My rule of thumb is "if hardware is too hot for you to hold your finger on it indefinitely" it's too hot and it's going to break very soon! Temperature kills h

by bullen 5y ago

My rule of thumb is "if hardware is too hot for you to hold your finger on it indefinitely" it's too hot and it's going to break very soon! Temperature kills hardware, you need to bring those temperatures down, and the only way to do that is to lower the wattage! Atom is the perfect design, no crap and low power!

bayindirh 5y ago
> "if hardware is too hot for you to hold your finger on it indefinitely" it's too hot and it's going to break very soon! From my experience, that doesn't happen like that in enterprise hardware. Either wrong voltage (inside the system) or defective design causes premature death. If the server BMC says it's fine, it's fine. > Temperature kills hardware, you need to bring those temperatures down, and the only way to do that is to lower the wattage! High Performance Computing doesn't work like that, unfortunately :) > Atom is the perfect design, no crap and low power! I'm sure it has its own uses and can accomplish a lot, but in HPC, it won't cut it. I use small SBCs at home to do and try a lot of fun and useful stuff, but it has limits.
littlestymaar 5y ago
> Temperature kills hardware, you need to bring those temperatures down, and the only way to do that is to lower the wattage! The best way to keep your CPU intact for a long time is keep it powered off. But then you have probably no use for this CPU… > it's too hot and it's going to break very soon! “very soon” on your scale from now to 100 years, probably. But most people prefer having a CPU working at full capacity for a few years than having a useless brick of silicon sitting around for a hundred year.
holoduke 5y ago
Your rule of thumb is wrong. The thing what kills hardware is temperature fluctuations. Keeping a processor running consistently at 90 degrees is much better than switching it off and on all the time. Running a CPU at full load has a very minor impact on its mechanical properties. Even after running for 10 years. Much less than storing it in your drawer for the same amount of time.
- adrian_b 5y ago
  Temperature fluctuations damage the interfaces between the different materials inside an integrated circuit, so they will greatly lower the lifetime. Nonetheless, there is a continuous aging of the metal traces (electromigration) and especially of the insulating layers, e.g. the MOS transistor gates, due to the difusion of atoms. This continuous aging is accelerated by steady-state high temperatures and it eventually results in either open circuits or short circuits somewhere, destroying the device. Good MOS integrated circuits are designed for a lifetime at their maximum specified temperature of at least 10 years or even 20 years or more for the better of them. Nevertheless, this is puny in comparison with the lifetime of many semiconductor components produced 40-50 years ago, before the continuous shrinking of the active device sizes, which could have lifetimes of hundreds of years, when free from fabrication defects.
  - bullen 5y ago
    Yes, so I'm betting on these 14nm Atom boards because they are very performant per watt (I get twice the server juice out of these at 25W than I get out of my 6600 desktop at 65W!!!!!!!!!) and I think they will be more reliable at 42 celcius full blast than the still non existent 10 or smaller nm. I even think like you that my 45nm D510MO probably will outlive these! But it's so underpowered (like 1/10 of the perf. at 15W) compared to these that I'm willing to take the risk! The risk of new boards being so much better that I'll have to throw these away ever is zero at this point, memory being the bottleneck!
formerly_proven 5y ago
> "if hardware is too hot for you to hold your finger on it indefinitely" That's only like ~45 °C or so.
- xxs 5y ago
  More like 48, but yeah.
NavinF 5y ago
> "if hardware is too hot for you to hold your finger on it indefinitely" it's too hot and it's going to break very soon! Are you talking about junction temperature, package temp, or heatsink temp? The only CPU I own with a package temp that's cold enough to touch is inside my phone. Meanwhile some of my data center machines are a decade old and run at 75C all day. I've never had a CPU fail before the machine became obsolete
- bullen 5y ago
  linux sensors command, where ever that is.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    That data can't really be trusted, because various sensors often have large offsets or are just bogus on specific hardware. E.g. lm-sensors reports both a sensor with 0 °C and one that's usually something like 90-100 °C on my desktop, while also misreporting the CPU temperature due to not taking the AMD offset into account (might be patched in recent versions).
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      In terms of Intel and/or enterprise hardware, the values are reliable. You can cross-check them via IPMI Sensors (provided by BMC itself) or Intel powertop (by crosschecking cpu throttle states). Intel also writes relevant support code (cpufreqd, thermals, etc.) themselves. The biggest offender in my experience is OrangePi Zero, but I need a thermal probe to verify it.
xxs 5y ago
>if hardware is too hot for you to hold your finger on it indefinitely That's 50C (bit less)... which is quite low operating temperature and very far from anything that damages silicon. Temperature fluctuations are far worse due to thermal expansion/contraction.
nicoburns 5y ago
Does temperature kill hardware? I wasn't very careful with my first laptop (a 2007 model with a dual-core CPU and a discrete GPU), and often used to run it on my lap with the fans blocked. It regularly got up to a sustained temperature of 96c. And it ran fine for 5 years (used for several hours most days) before the screen gave out. It actually still runs fine now with an external display, although it rarely gets used.
kingosticks 5y ago
Enterprise networking chips happily run 80C+ junction temperature (much too hot to touch) for the part lifetime - which is 10+ years. There are plenty of things that damage chips, especially those at 7nm and beyond but this too-hot-to-touch "rule" is rubbish.

by bullen 5y ago

bayindirh 5y ago

> "if hardware is too hot for you to hold your finger on it indefinitely" it's too hot and it's going to break very soon! From my experience, that doesn't happen like that in enterprise hardware. Either wrong voltage (inside the system) or defective design causes premature death. If the server BMC says it's fine, it's fine. > Temperature kills hardware, you need to bring those temperatures down, and the only way to do that is to lower the wattage! High Performance Computing doesn't work like that, unfortunately :) > Atom is the perfect design, no crap and low power! I'm sure it has its own uses and can accomplish a lot, but in HPC, it won't cut it. I use small SBCs at home to do and try a lot of fun and useful stuff, but it has limits.

littlestymaar 5y ago

> Temperature kills hardware, you need to bring those temperatures down, and the only way to do that is to lower the wattage! The best way to keep your CPU intact for a long time is keep it powered off. But then you have probably no use for this CPU… > it's too hot and it's going to break very soon! “very soon” on your scale from now to 100 years, probably. But most people prefer having a CPU working at full capacity for a few years than having a useless brick of silicon sitting around for a hundred year.

holoduke 5y ago

Your rule of thumb is wrong. The thing what kills hardware is temperature fluctuations. Keeping a processor running consistently at 90 degrees is much better than switching it off and on all the time. Running a CPU at full load has a very minor impact on its mechanical properties. Even after running for 10 years. Much less than storing it in your drawer for the same amount of time.

adrian_b 5y ago
Temperature fluctuations damage the interfaces between the different materials inside an integrated circuit, so they will greatly lower the lifetime. Nonetheless, there is a continuous aging of the metal traces (electromigration) and especially of the insulating layers, e.g. the MOS transistor gates, due to the difusion of atoms. This continuous aging is accelerated by steady-state high temperatures and it eventually results in either open circuits or short circuits somewhere, destroying the device. Good MOS integrated circuits are designed for a lifetime at their maximum specified temperature of at least 10 years or even 20 years or more for the better of them. Nevertheless, this is puny in comparison with the lifetime of many semiconductor components produced 40-50 years ago, before the continuous shrinking of the active device sizes, which could have lifetimes of hundreds of years, when free from fabrication defects.
- bullen 5y ago
  Yes, so I'm betting on these 14nm Atom boards because they are very performant per watt (I get twice the server juice out of these at 25W than I get out of my 6600 desktop at 65W!!!!!!!!!) and I think they will be more reliable at 42 celcius full blast than the still non existent 10 or smaller nm. I even think like you that my 45nm D510MO probably will outlive these! But it's so underpowered (like 1/10 of the perf. at 15W) compared to these that I'm willing to take the risk! The risk of new boards being so much better that I'll have to throw these away ever is zero at this point, memory being the bottleneck!

formerly_proven 5y ago

> "if hardware is too hot for you to hold your finger on it indefinitely" That's only like ~45 °C or so.

xxs 5y ago
More like 48, but yeah.

NavinF 5y ago

> "if hardware is too hot for you to hold your finger on it indefinitely" it's too hot and it's going to break very soon! Are you talking about junction temperature, package temp, or heatsink temp? The only CPU I own with a package temp that's cold enough to touch is inside my phone. Meanwhile some of my data center machines are a decade old and run at 75C all day. I've never had a CPU fail before the machine became obsolete

bullen 5y ago
linux sensors command, where ever that is.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  That data can't really be trusted, because various sensors often have large offsets or are just bogus on specific hardware. E.g. lm-sensors reports both a sensor with 0 °C and one that's usually something like 90-100 °C on my desktop, while also misreporting the CPU temperature due to not taking the AMD offset into account (might be patched in recent versions).
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    In terms of Intel and/or enterprise hardware, the values are reliable. You can cross-check them via IPMI Sensors (provided by BMC itself) or Intel powertop (by crosschecking cpu throttle states). Intel also writes relevant support code (cpufreqd, thermals, etc.) themselves. The biggest offender in my experience is OrangePi Zero, but I need a thermal probe to verify it.

xxs 5y ago

>if hardware is too hot for you to hold your finger on it indefinitely That's 50C (bit less)... which is quite low operating temperature and very far from anything that damages silicon. Temperature fluctuations are far worse due to thermal expansion/contraction.

nicoburns 5y ago

Does temperature kill hardware? I wasn't very careful with my first laptop (a 2007 model with a dual-core CPU and a discrete GPU), and often used to run it on my lap with the fans blocked. It regularly got up to a sustained temperature of 96c. And it ran fine for 5 years (used for several hours most days) before the screen gave out. It actually still runs fine now with an external display, although it rarely gets used.

kingosticks 5y ago

Enterprise networking chips happily run 80C+ junction temperature (much too hot to touch) for the part lifetime - which is 10+ years. There are plenty of things that damage chips, especially those at 7nm and beyond but this too-hot-to-touch "rule" is rubbish.