我也不懂 CPU,不过我觉得出错概率增加是会有的,但时钟频率降低是不科学的(除非你开启了超频或睿频,老化的 CPU 发现高频率跑不动了,就会自动降频,但这对额定工作频率的 CPU 应该不是个事)
曾经看到内核邮件列表如下的有趣讨论。
From: Pavel Machek Date: Fri May 11 2007 - 08:29:56 ESTHi!
> >>You say there is "no danger of overflow", and I mostly
> >>agree that once
> >>we're talking about 64-bit values, the overflow issue
> >>simply doesn't
> >>exist, and furthermore the difference between 63 and
> >>64 bits is not really
> >>relevant, so there's no major reason to actively avoid
> >>signed entries.
> >>
> >>So in that sense, it all sounds perfectly sane. And
> >>I'm definitely not
> >>sure your "292 years after bootup" worry is really
> >>worth even considering.
> >>
> >
> >I would hate to tell mission control for Mankind's
> >first mission to another
> >star to reboot every 200 years because "there is no
> >need to worry about it."
> >
> >As a matter of principle an OS should never need a
> >reboot (with exception for upgrading). If you say you
> >have to reboot every 200 years, why not every 100?
> >Every 50? .... Every 45 days (you know what I am
> >referring to :-) ?
>
> There's always going to be an upper limit on the
> representation of time. At least until we figure out
> how to implement infinity properly.
There's also upper limit on life time of this universe. 1000 bits is
certainly enough to represent that in u-seconds.
Also notice that current cpus were not designed to work 300 years.
When we have hw designed for 50 years+, we can start to worry.
Pavel
From: Linus Torvalds Date: Fri May 11 2007 - 12:52:13 EST On Thu, 10 May 2007, Pavel Machek wrote:> > Also notice that current cpus were not designed to work 300 years.> When we have hw designed for 50 years+, we can start to worry.Indeed. CPU manufacturers don't seem to talk about it very much, and searching for it with google on intel.com comes up withThe failure rate and Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) data is not currently available on our website. You may contact Intel® Customer Support for this information.which seems to be just a fancy way of saying "we don't actually want to talk about it". Probably not because it's actually all that bad, but simply because people don't think about it, and there's no reason a CPU manufacturer would *want* people to think about it.But if you wondered why server CPU's usually run at a lower frequency, it's because of MTBF issues. I think a desktop CPU is usually specced to run for 5 years (and that's expecting that it's turned off or at least idle much of the time), while a server CPU is expected to last longer and be active a much bigger percentage of time.("Active" == "heat" == "more damage due to atom migration etc". Which is part of why you're not supposed to overclock stuff: it may well work well for you, but for all you know it will cut your expected CPU life by 90%).Of course, all the other components have a MTBF too (and I'd generally expect a power supply component to fail long before the CPU does). And yes, some machines will last for decades. But I suspect we've all heard of machines that just don't work reliably any more.Linus
From: Pavel Machek Date: Fri May 11 2007 - 15:21:35 EST Actually, when I talked with AMD, they told me that cpus should last
10 years *at their max specced temperature*... which is 95Celsius. So
overclocking is not that evil, according to my info.
(That would mean way more than 10 years if you use your cpu
'normally'.)
But I guess capacitors from cpu power supply will hate you running cpu
at 95C...
Pavel