Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
On Sat, Nov 08, 2008 at 04:38:39PM -0600, Mark Allums wrote:Douglas A. Tutty wrote:The current crop of boards is a marketing-driven thing. You don't get the best board, anymore, you get what the industry has decided to give you. Like the color coordination of clothing, or the artificial flavor of the month, motherboards are no longer a tech-driven item. The engineers design what the sales department tells them to. They are only intended to last appx. three years. (2-3 release cycles.)What about if you don't stick with i386/amd64? I know, there are fewer and fewer (e.g. VAX, Alpha, etc). Do, e.g. HP-9000s have a longer design life? What about IBM SystemP (formally RS/6000) which is PowerPC-based? Sun's Sparc64? Doug.
I am less of an expert on pro/industrial, embedded, and non-x86 things. I believe that the design life on non-consumer items is dependent on the application, e.g. satellite transmitter amplifiers (using vacuum tubes!) aren't considered "burned-in" until they have been tested 8000 hours. But, would you want a render farm made up of SGI workstations from the 1990s? The state of the art is still moving pretty fast. Even for mainframes, the shelf-life of what is generally considered useful for a lot of applications is less than 6 years. We *nix people are reactionary, in reality. We get sentimental about old hardware. We want to run 2.6 kernels on 386SX-16s. (16 MHz for you young whippersnappers reading this.) Mark Allums