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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

> Chips developed for computers and phones lasted an average of two to four years of normal use.

Err what?

While we tend to think of them as unchanging, perfect slabs, integrated circuits change over their lifetimes and eventually fail. Unsurprisingly, these effects are greater when feature sizes are smaller. Here are some links I dug up on the subject: https://semiengineering.com/transistor-aging-intensifies-10n... http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7796117/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative-bias_temperature_inst...

A vivid real world example of this was the 2011 Cougar Point chipset problem which would cause the SATA ports to essentially burn out well short of the expected lifetime of the system. https://semiengineering.com/transistor-aging-intensifies-10n...

This is a real thing. For game consoles, which run their chips pretty "hot" in order to meet the performance requirements for high-end gaming, the main SOCs have a design lifetime. There are deliberate trade-offs between performance and the expected lifetime of the part. This lifetime is difficult to estimate prior to ship.

One console made a firmware update about a year after its release that increased its clocks by about ten percent. I'm guessing they did this after seeing telemetry numbers indicating that the box's cooling system was doing a better job than expected, and that there was lifetime headroom available (probably other factors were involved, too, but heat is a major one).

I'd be charitable and say that gaming chips run hot because cooling systems are "optimized", not for performance reasons.

And by optimized, I mean shoehorning the smallest / cheapest solution in there that barely meets cooling needs.

Consoles are pretty serious about effective cooling. There is definitely price pressure, but that's not a one-sided thing -- you need to make sure that the unit lasts long enough, and that its cooling system doesn't generate too much noise for the environment (typically a quiet living room). And then you need headroom for envrionmentals (e.g., being stuff into the back of an entertainment unit next to other equipment). The current generation of consoles are quiet compared to the last generation, and more powerful.

Cooling "needs" have to take into account the whole product and user experience, not just keeping a single chip from melting down.

I think all the console makers learned a lesson from the Red Ring Of Death. No one wants to be having a massive portion of their systems become useless hunks of scrap because of poor thermal design not dissipating enough heat and causing the solder to crack.

RROD cost Microsoft a billion dollars, maybe two billion. That doesn't scream "Please shave the cooling system down to the absolute minimum cost on the next console" to the hardware team.

The XBone cooler is a pretty decent one, because the alternative is a ton of warranty work, plus lawsuits and bad press. And worse, a bad customer experience.

Survivorship bias. A lot of low-end gear dies in this time frame due to insufficient cooling, badly designed cases etc.

I agree, when I’m troubleshooting a general rule is ‘it’s never the CPU’. I think the writer has misinterpreted something to derive that statement.

From the rest of the article I would have said 2 to 4 years of use at a high utilization. In that case maybe.

It's never the CPU has been my rule as well, except for a new build. Then it might be the CPU.

Silicon chips age due to electromigration, which is exacerbated by small feature sizes. Chips made 20 year ago could take decades for enough migration to cause failure which is why you’ve never known or cared before. Today due to the much smaller processes we use it’s closer to a few years.

And hot-carrier injection (HCI), oxide breakdown and, negative-bias temperature instability (NBTI).

The used market for computers strongly suggests otherwise...

I wonder if the average is skewed because so many people buy new phones every year / every other year.

Still, it's not like the chips are failing. People typically get a new phone because:

* Battery is too degraded

* Hardware is unsupported by the current OS version

* Screen failure

* Water damage (not as much with newer water resistant phones)

* Want to be able to run apps faster

* OS/Firmware failure (e.g. bootloop)

* Want to own the latest phone (non-performance reasons)

* Want a phone with a new hardware feature (e.g. wireless charging)

I don't think I've ever heard of someone's phone just not working mysteriously.

It is not a phone, but my coffee machine electronic just died (but after 7 years). It had no visible damage (water, electric shock).

After changing the main PCB it was working again, like new.

I regret not playing more with the old PCB though, like checking capacitors or resistors values.

It might have been bad solder. Some of that lead-free stuff is utter garbage and could have failed mechanically (of it hadn’t been on right) or reflowed due to the heat.

I fixed our 20-year-old range by replacing capacitors. They failed exactly like the caps on early-mid-2000's motherboards.

Yeah, I’m right now using a 14 year old monitor, and I’ve replaced two caps, but it’s still running.

Next to it I have a 6 year old monitor, in which I can’t replace the caps because it’s glued together.

Besides, when something fails, it's almost always capacitors, mechanical devices or FLASH memory.

Unless those "chips" the article is talking about is only FLASH, it's a very weird statement.

actually i had s4 mini and it died after 3 or so years, no booting, black screen only. power button does nothing and computer doesnt see.

Did you diagnose the cause of the failure? My guess is it was a failed power supply and that likely resulted from failed capacitors.

Most chip failures do not surface as "just stop working" - they surface as the chip overheating much more often. Or the chip over-volting other components. Or failing to throttle down, resulting in excessive battery wear. Or surfacing the occasional computation error. Or some feature just no longer being available.

Also remember: batteries, screen, BIOS... all are controlled by their own chips these days; chips whose failures are attributed to the component they're attached to.

I assume by bootloop you are talking about the LG failure that impacted the Nexus 5x among others. That _was_ attributed to hardware failure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_smartphone_bootloop_issue...

> I don't think I've ever heard of someone's phone just not working mysteriously.

My Nokia 808 suddenly died after a couple of years. Blank screen, did not react to any button presses or reset attempts. Even after replacing the battery.

Bootloop is down to hardware ageing, specifically solder, as I understand it. System resets etc. don't fix it. I've had two phones die from it. The cure for the brave involves reflowing the solder in an oven.

The Nexus 5x CPU solder failed pretty regularly at 1 year. I'm not sure if that counts as the chip lasting that long, because the CPU was technically fine, just poorly soldered, but the product wasn't working.