From my experience, that doesn't happen like that in enterprise hardware. Either wrong voltage (inside the system) or defective design causes premature death. If the server BMC says it's fine, it's fine.
> Temperature kills hardware, you need to bring those temperatures down, and the only way to do that is to lower the wattage!
High Performance Computing doesn't work like that, unfortunately :)
> Atom is the perfect design, no crap and low power!
I'm sure it has its own uses and can accomplish a lot, but in HPC, it won't cut it. I use small SBCs at home to do and try a lot of fun and useful stuff, but it has limits.
Nonetheless, there is a continuous aging of the metal traces (electromigration) and especially of the insulating layers, e.g. the MOS transistor gates, due to the difusion of atoms.
This continuous aging is accelerated by steady-state high temperatures and it eventually results in either open circuits or short circuits somewhere, destroying the device.
Good MOS integrated circuits are designed for a lifetime at their maximum specified temperature of at least 10 years or even 20 years or more for the better of them.
Nevertheless, this is puny in comparison with the lifetime of many semiconductor components produced 40-50 years ago, before the continuous shrinking of the active device sizes, which could have lifetimes of hundreds of years, when free from fabrication defects.
I even think like you that my 45nm D510MO probably will outlive these! But it's so underpowered (like 1/10 of the perf. at 15W) compared to these that I'm willing to take the risk!
The risk of new boards being so much better that I'll have to throw these away ever is zero at this point, memory being the bottleneck!
The best way to keep your CPU intact for a long time is keep it powered off. But then you have probably no use for this CPU…
> it's too hot and it's going to break very soon!
“very soon” on your scale from now to 100 years, probably. But most people prefer having a CPU working at full capacity for a few years than having a useless brick of silicon sitting around for a hundred year.
Are you talking about junction temperature, package temp, or heatsink temp? The only CPU I own with a package temp that's cold enough to touch is inside my phone.
Meanwhile some of my data center machines are a decade old and run at 75C all day. I've never had a CPU fail before the machine became obsolete
The biggest offender in my experience is OrangePi Zero, but I need a thermal probe to verify it.
That's 50C (bit less)... which is quite low operating temperature and very far from anything that damages silicon. Temperature fluctuations are far worse due to thermal expansion/contraction.
That's only like ~45 °C or so.
There are plenty of things that damage chips, especially those at 7nm and beyond but this too-hot-to-touch "rule" is rubbish.
Temperature kills hardware, you need to bring those temperatures down, and the only way to do that is to lower the wattage!
Atom is the perfect design, no crap and low power!