4 ms·
The only thing surprising to me in the results was that laptop CPUs and memory were more reliable than desktop. Their reasoning is that laptops are built more c
by TwoBit 14y ago
The only thing surprising to me in the results was that laptop CPUs and memory were more reliable than desktop. Their reasoning is that laptops are built more conservatively. Maybe so, but desktops come from many more sources and may simply have. much more variable build quality. I want to see that data for desktops made only by the companies who make the laptops.
- pkteison 14y agoThey already excluded overclocked and white box systems from the laptop comparison. Edit: From laptop comparison section of original paper: "To avoid conflation with other factors, we remove overclocked and white box machines from our analysis. Because desktops have 35% more TACT than laptops, we only count failures within the first 30 days of TACT, for machines with at least 30 days of TACT."
- jleader 14y agoI suspect laptops also don't get as many hardware upgrades. While many people probably never open their desktop enclosure, some do, and I suspect a far smaller percentage open up their laptops. (Edited to remove mention of overclocking, after I noticed that the researchers left overclocked systems out of the comparison). Another possibility is that hardware is designed to handle some level of outlying abuse (maybe it's engineered to handle 95% of the things people do to it), and laptops' outliers are more severe relative to their average level of abuse than desktops.
- beagle3 14y agoI don't think it is surprising at all. A modern laptop (produced in the last 10 years or so) has zero unused space, meaning that even if they are not treated well, components won't come out of sockets because they literally have no where to go. Most laptops also have tighter thermal regulation than desktops, because they are facing a harder cooling problem and wouldn't work well if they didn't. Laptops also lag desktop technology by at least half a generation -- the average laptop CPU at a given time is produced with older-at-the-time (higher yield, better understood, more reliable) silicon processes than desktop chips. Every floor-sitting-desktop I've seen gets kicks occasionally, and there's actually room for memory, fans and cards to move around. I would guess a Lenovo or Dell desktop is still less reliable (as measured by real life crashes such as in this study) than a laptop produced by the same company.
- narism 14y agoThe Nvidia GPU fiasco shows that you can still have problems even if the component doesn't have anywhere to go.
- regularfry 14y agoLaptops are more likely to fail in situations where they can't report crash data.
- bryne 14y agoWhat, because they're more prone to catastrophic, accidental physical failure, being less sedentary devices? I don't think that has anything to do with the results in this paper.
- jleader 14y agoLess likely to be online at the time?
- narism 14y agoWindows will write out a minidump to disk when it kernel panics and report it to MS later when it's back online.
- regularfry 14y agoWell, there goes that theory :-)
- ak217 14y agoLaptops get much better integration testing, cleaner power (fewer cheap crappy power supplies), and fewer user-installed parts. I'm not surprised. I would agree with you that desktops built by a major OEM should exhibit less of this behavior.