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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

Many of these effects are highly temperature- and voltage-dependent, so they're way more likely to show up in chips that are overvolted, overclocked and inadequately cooled. But we're yet to see overclocking enthusiasts run into these reliability concerns, so my best guess is that the safety factors embedded in current designs are enough to make them less of an issue.

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I'm an EE and never had a chip fail when working inside its recommended operating parameters and properly protected and I have devices in the field over 20 years, I do see failures when poor soldering or electrolytic gone bad compromises the power supply. My main worry is some flash memory is only guarenteed minimum 25 years, Not sure how they determined this but yet to see any issues.

I would hate to be on a generational spaceship or the first settler on another planet with currently designed commercial stuff.

Flash is indeed a weak link. I use to put together embedded Linux systems out of commodity server components 15 years ago, and over the years we lost many flash chips (altho they would often continue functioning in a degraded state… read only) due to the high logging rate of Linux combined with the low write endurance of typical usb flash disks. You can get more expensive single level cell (or pseudo-single level cell) chips now that can last an extremely long time.

Old Tesla Model Ses had this same problem with the infotainment system flash, but Tesla will fix it for you for free now since the infotainment system contains some features NHTSA considers safety essential (wipers, etc).

I'm only buying high endurance memory now. I've had enough cheap usb and sd cards die on me. Losing my data is not worth saving $10.

Good flash atleast goes readonly (Sandisk USBs in my experience), bad flash, not so much. The controller is probably playing a part as well.

> But we're yet to see overclocking enthusiasts run into these reliability concerns

Isn’t that also because said enthusiasts tend to use massive coolers and monitor temperatures to keep their cpus as cool as possible?

I know that I for one would never let a cpu on my desktop get over 80 degrees, but it’s common for laptops to go to 100.

Probably. From a follow on article,

"The biggest factor is heat. “Higher speeds tends to produce higher temperatures and temperature is the biggest killer,” says Rita Horner, senior product marketing manager for 3D-IC at Synopsys. “Temperature exacerbates electron migration. The expected life can exponentially change from a tiny delta in temperature.”"

https://semiengineering.com/aging-problems-at-5nm-and-below/

"overvolted, overclocked and inadequately cooled" - sounds like a default GPU setup (only half-joking). IIRC the optimal performance per watt for a modern consumer GPU is at half the stock TDP, according to MonsterLabo.

People have experimented with GPU's that have been used for crypto mining (kind of a worst case scenario) and haven't managed to hit any reliability concerns so far - the cards seem to work just fine.

They also undervolt their cards, because it's more efficient.

> we're yet to see overclocking enthusiasts run into these reliability concerns

Several people on Reddit reported their Zen 2 cpus degraded within few months when overvolted.

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