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dijityesterday at 4:36 PM1 replyview on HN

> Seems to be a mental mishmash. For one thing, they are taking it as given that temperature is relevant to device lifetime, but Google's FAST 2007 paper said "higher temperatures are not associated with higher failure rates".

Google have been wrong a couple of times, and this is one area where I think what they've said (18 years ago btw) might have had some time to meet the rubber of reality a bit more.

Google also famously chose to disavow ECC as mandatory[0] but then quietly changed course[1].

In fact, even within the field of memory: higher temperatures cause more errors[2], and voltage leaking is more common at higher temperatures within dense lithographic electronics (memory controllers, CPUs)[3].

Regardless: thermal expansion and contraction will cause degradation of basically any material that I can think of, so if you can utilise the machines 100% consistently and maintain a solid temperature then maybe the hardware doesn't age as aggressively as our desktop PCs that play games- assuming there's no voltage leaking going on to crash things.

[0]: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14206811

[2]: https://dramsec.ethz.ch/papers/mathur-dramsec22.pdf

[3]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271300947_Analysis_...


Replies

jeffbeeyesterday at 5:06 PM

I am not taking Google's result at face value, but the article shouldn't make assumptions without supporting evidence, either. ASHRAE used to say your datacenter should be 20º-25º which you know makes a certain amount of sense when it comes from an organization earning its money from installing and repairing CRACs. Now they admit that 18º-27º is common and they allow for up to 45º ambient designs. They are following the industry up.

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