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Microsoft Research wrote:We present the first large-scale analysis of hardware failure rates on a million consumer PCs. We find that many failures are neither transient nor independent. Instead, a large portion of hardware induced failures are recurrent: a machine that crashes from a fault in hardware is up to two orders of magnitude more likely to crash a second time. For example, machines with at least 30 days of accumulated CPU time over an 8 month period had a 1 in 190 chance of crashing due to a CPU subsystem fault. Further, machines that crashed once had a probability of 1 in 3.3 of crashing a second time. Our study examines failures due to faults within the CPU, DRAM and disk subsystems. Our analysis spans desktops and laptops, CPU vendor, overclocking, underclocking, generic vs. brand name, and characteristics such as machine speed and calendar age. Among our many results, we find that CPU fault rates are correlated with the number of cycles executed, underclocked machines are significantly more reliable than machines running at their rated speed, and laptops are more reliable than desktops.

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:Huh. I guess I've just been unlucky then; my desktops have generally been Ol' Reliable while every laptop I've ever had significant contact with has been a shoe-in for the Sledgehammer Solution.

TronPaul wrote:I haven't read the study in full yet, but it seems to me that Microsoft did not include the more likely failures: power supply, motherboard, or GPU. I can't find what their data set size is either in the paper.

I bet most of the hardware failures in the study are due to overheating. I'd be more interested in seeing the difference between computers that are adequately cooled and inadequately cooled.

Sarevok wrote:Can someone elaborate CPU faults ? Is it the hardware developing a permanent fault or an error in CPU design causing it to execute an operation different way leading to software crashes ?