Re: Computer architects leaving Intel...

Brett wrote:

John Dallman <jgd@cix.co.uk> wrote:

In fact, organisations replace about a quarter of their machines each
year, always buying up-to-date ones, and want to run the /same/ version
of software on all of them. They want common software versions for data
compatibility, ease of training and so on. That means that a new release
of an application has to run on all the machines sold in the last four
years, sometimes longer.

 I assume you work in the high end, as the average desktop PC is replaced
every 8 years on a “use it until it breaks” policy.
 Dell will tell you 5 years, and Google is paid to say the same.
And that actually might be true for laptops, but not desktops.
 The bulk of the PC’s and servers where I work are a dozen years old.
A smattering of new PC’s bring the average down to 9 years.

Organizations that rely on commercial licenced software have a much easier calculation to make:
"I pay 10-100K dollar every year per CPU for my 3D CAD/modelling/whatever software, if I can buy a new system in 2-4 years time which is 50% faster (more cores/faster threads), then it could make sense to upgrade every year, except for the hazzle of installing everything."
Terje
--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"