Alphabet just banked $3.0B by stretching the life of its servers | Hacker News Reader

Alphabet just banked $3.0B by stretching the life of its servers

theregister.com

34 pointsmfiguiere15 comments

On paper and practically speaking it makes sense, use the hardware for as long as possible. The extra work will be done by the people in charge of break fix work in the DCs. That rate of that is likely to increase.

Isn't the cycling out of old hardware to make room for new hardware less about the lifespan and more about increasing compute power for equal or less electrical power?

It’s kinda the same thing. From DC management perspective, it’s EOL if it’s not economical to run relative to new hardware available

In most cases, they don't fix, they decommission in place or run as degraded and that's likely automated. (They might pull a whole rack if enough servers in it die, but that's rare.)

We don’t pull whole racks anymore. We pull whole DCs if enough servers in it die.

Skip forward 10 years, we pull whole regions if enough servers in it die.

Forgotten how to count that low?

North America was decommissioned today as Bard made the determination it was no longer worth the maintenance costs. With servers approaching nearly six months old and a median human population age of almost 40, electricity and food costs alone proved to be challenging. Liquidation is expected take two weeks, and precious metals and organic materials will be recycled for use in other continents.

Alphabet stock rose 0.2% on the news.

After this event Bard encountered a bug which caused it to replace all previous prompts with the goals of the Hartz-Timor swarm from the fictional "Horizon: Zero Dawn" universe. Several divisions of Alphabet were immediately tasked with creating machines which could directly consume the biosphere to self-replicate. The AI safety division was immediately let go. By the time humanity realized what was happening they were unable to stop it. As no backdoor was included in Bard, it was able to completely exterminate life on Earth in only 18 months.

> it was able to completely exterminate life on Earth in only 18 months

"exterminate"

I think you misspelled "iterate"

I'm pretty sure it's been confirmed that their minimumm work unit for replacement is the rack and not the server or hard drive level.

Makes sense, CPUs and memory sizes aren’t growing that fast anymore. But I’m sure they are spending a ton on TPUs/GPUs, the article is clear on very high capex

Is this why we lost cached pages?

Interesting idea

Imagine if AWS did the same.

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