Brion Vibber wrote:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Anthony makes a good point. Hardware does break down over time, and has to be replaced. Even more likely is that it will become obsolete before it breaks down.
When that becomes a significant issue, then the model will need to be updated. I've been told that, so far, pretty much all the hardware we've ever bought is still in use.
I should point out that it hasn't been that long; we started the Florida cluster in early 2004 following the Great Double Server Crash of Christmas 2003.
The oldest machine we have in service is Larousse, an 866-MHz Pentium III which does some specialized and backup services, and used to be our secondary web server in the old California location.
Everything else is less than two years old, with the oldest generation being 2.6GHz Pentium IVs. Not quite obsolete yet!
A number of machines have had to go out for repair or replacement over time (usually faulty memory, sometimes failed disks), but most are still chugging away.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Moore's Law isn't what it used to be. Processor speeds have virtually been standing still for the past two years. In October 2003, Intel's fastest 32-bit processor was 3.2 GHz. Today, two years on, it is 3.8 GHz, an increase of 19%. That's a far cry from the doubling predicted by Moore's law.
Don't think that Moore's law is inevitable, and that some new discovery on the horizon will see processor speeds resume the trend as if nothing happened. It shouldn't be suprising that performance increases are becoming more difficult, as the technology approaches physical limits. I wouldn't be suprised if the speeds of our present processors remined quite acceptable for several years to come.
-- Tim Starling