Re: Computer architects leaving Intel...

Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> schrieb:

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."

Made more complicated by wildly different license schemes.
Some vendors give the victim^H^H^H^H^H^Hcustomer a number of
licenses for interactive use (up to four cores, for example),
and you have to purchase extra for "HPC" use (which is ridiculous
today).  With others, you need a "network license" to even connect
remotely, but you can run a single calculation on as many parallel
cores and CPUs, on a cluster, as you want.