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Comment by slacka | Hacker News Reader

This wouldn't do any noticeable damage. Modern CPUs have excellent thermal management. As far a wear goes, a hot spot in chip would in theory slightly decrease the long life span of a CPU.

If you expanded your question to hardware in the computer, then yes you can easily cause damage. BIOS’s can be flashed to make the system unbootable or overclock/stress components. Back in the bad old days of Linux, you could easily damage your monitor with the wrong xorg.conf settings.

Your question got me thinking what’s the MTBF of modern CPUs? My google-fu failed me finding any reliable source of this, but I’m sure it’s long, 10+ years.

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> Back in the bad old days of Linux, you could easily damage your monitor with the wrong xorg.conf settings

You could also damage a floppy drive making it read/write, for many times, few sectors outer the common limits. Being there, done that.

But after so many discussions on online forums that it was impossible to cause physical damage using software (other than overwriting firmwares), I gave up and kept this (and the asm code) deep inside my heart.

And bringing it up still gives me chills that those discussions will return right now...

Sounds close to

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/walking-drives.html

Your question got me thinking what’s the MTBF of modern CPUs? My google-fu failed me finding any reliable source of this, but I’m sure it’s long, 10+ years.

Probably decreasing, and soon not much longer than warranty period... the transistors have gotten so small that they're on the threshold of barely working even in normal operation.

As for older CPUs, they could definitely last many decades because of the lower stresses of larger process sizes, and they were designed with much higher margins.

Do you have anything to back this up?

According to the paper linked in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12373015), apparently the high-k dielectric nodes used at 45nm and below show ~5x times worse NBTI ageing than non-high-k 45nm PMOS gates, which decides the tolerances that are selected to provide X years of life.

(IANAEE)

Back in the bad old days of Linux, you could easily damage your monitor with the wrong xorg.conf settings.

Back when a certain kind of line printer was commonplace (has a circulating ribbon with the typeface repeated, and n hammers in a line going across the entire width) programmers could sabotage the printer by printing the pattern on the ribbon. This would cause all of the hammers to fire at once, which the machine wasn't designed to withstand.

I've also heard of monitors being broken by having the speaker output the resonant frequency of the glass cover. However, I can't vouch for this one.

Sounds I'll never forget:

* Modem

* Dot matrix printer

* DEC Line printer

    > Back in the bad old days of Linux, you could
    > easily damage your monitor with the wrong
    > xorg.conf settings.

Nit: Back in the old days of Linux there was no xorg.conf, it was called XF86Config

I could never, and I mean never, get a XF86Config to work. Totally turned me off of Linux.

>what’s the MTBF of modern CPUs? My google-fu failed me finding any reliable source of this, but I’m sure it’s long, 10+ years.

It's so long that probably nobody bothers to measure it.

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