An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs
research.microsoft.com
An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs
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Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs
#2Interesting stuff. You can improve reliability by running your system at a lower speed. Here's a blog post with a summary of some of the conclusions of the paper above: http://grano.la/blog/2012/06/improve-the-reliability-of-your... (Disclaimer: that's my company's blog)
One question I still have is whether the switching of CPU frequencies has any effect, or if it is only the average speed that correlates to the reliability. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this is the case, but it could be an area for further research.
Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs
#3Is there a compelling reason for this to be a PDF rather than HTML? I'm genuinely curious.
Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs
#4Is there a compelling reason for this to be a PDF rather than HTML? I'm genuinely curious.
I guess they just uploaded the final version they published in EuroSys 2011. Like all ACM conferences I know about, PDF is the way it is done. They would have to reformat for HTML.
Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs
#5Is there a compelling reason for this to be a PDF rather than HTML? I'm genuinely curious.
Most research papers are disseminated as PDF in my experience. This was a EuroSys 2011 paper I believe.
Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs
#6Interesting, too bad the power supplies could not be controlled in their setup, as a wonky power supply can unleash all kinds of gremlins that look like failures in components down the line.
Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs
#7There are a lot of insights in the paper, but I'd really like to know about this:
"The table shows that CPUs from Vendor A are nearly 20x as likely to crash a machine during the 8 month observation period when they are overclocked, and CPUs from Vendor B are over 4x as likely"
Obviously it's 5 times difference in probability to have unstable system if overclocked between Intel and AMD but they don't say which one is better. Anybody knows?
Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs
#8Interesting, too bad the power supplies could not be controlled in their setup, as a wonky power supply can unleash all kinds of gremlins that look like failures in components down the line.
Most of my desktop/server computer failures or abnormal behavior are due to power supplies not working properly, even when protected by a decent UPS.
Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs
#9There are a lot of insights in the paper, but I'd really like to know about this: "The table shows that CPUs from Vendor A are nearly 20x as likely to crash a machine during the 8 month observation period when they are overclocked, and CPUs from Vendor B are over 4x as likely" Obviously it's 5 times difference in probability to have unstable system if overclocked between Intel and AMD but they don't say which one is…
As a stab in the dark, I'd say that it's Intel's chips that perform more stably while overclocked, all else equal, because Intel comfortably holds the performance crown, and is thus very conservative in their binning.
Right now, Intel's fastest desktop chip is an i7 990X, which is $1,029 on Newegg. AMD's is an FX-8150, at $199.
Intel prices pretty fairly against AMD on the price/performance curve where AMD has a competitor, eg, the Core i5 3550 at $209 generally outperforms AMD's fastest chip. Pricing then soars off into the sky.
Which is to say, if AMD bumps the speed of their CPUs, they'll release a faster product, compete better against Intel (until Intel reacts), and make more money. If Intel bumps its speeds, they're competing against nobody but themselves, so they usually don't bother.
Therefore, you usually see Intel quite conservatively binning their chips, and they have a lot of headroom. It's not unusual to have an AMD chip that can't go 200mhz faster on air cooling, and to have an Intel chip that can go well in excess of 1ghz faster. So all else equal, bumping Intel chips is less likely to be an issue.
Now, there are some other factors at play here. Firstly, hardcore overclockers pretty much only buy Intel chips. Also, people that are serious often turn up the speed until right before the moment at which the chip starts getting SuperPI errors (i.e. errors at nearly maximum load).
But my totally uninformed gut feeling is that the majority of overclocks aren't done that seriously (if they are, it could actually reverse this analysis).
If we assume that, turning the knob up on an Intel chip without sophistication is much less likely to end badly. The crashes in their paper are not very frequent on average (months between), which isn't necessarily bad enough to revert to old CPU speeds even if the user knows that's what is going on.
Re: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs
#10Very useful -- I will take this analysis into account when it's time to upgrade my current personal machine or configure the next one! Thank you for posting this here.
The only thing I would have wanted to see but didn't in this analysis is how failure rates vary for different types of disk subsystem -- specifically, traditional hard drives versus the newer solid-state devices. I suspect, but don't know for sure, that the latter have much, much lower real-world failure rates in the first 30 days of total accumulated CPU time (TACT).
The authors openly suggest that the sharp difference in failure rates between desktop and laptop machines may be due in part to their disk subsystems: "Laptops are between 25% and 60% less likely than desktop machines to crash from a hardware fault over the first 30 days of observed TACT. We hypothesize that the durability features built into laptops (such as motion-robust hard drives) make these machines more robust to failures in general." Alas, the authors don't delve any further into it.
I'd like to see hard data comparing the real-world failure rates of both desktops and laptops using traditional versus solid-state disk subsystems.