Transistors are little switches. When you hold a switch on, especially when it’s hot, a bit of charge gets stuck where it shouldn’t. Every time that happens, it gets a little bit harder to switch. In other words, the transistor gets a little “lazier”.

Over 10 years, in a modern processor, the ALU can slow down 6%! FPGAs get hit even harder. Run it hard (slightly over-volted), and you’re looking at a few % a year of slowdown. Not something the average user would notice, but definitely has to be accounted for.

The neat part is that BTI damage can be (partially) recovered with…sleep! Give the transistor a break, and degradation reduces ~40% or more; the longer the better. CPU C states create lots of tiny idle windows (microsleeps), which drastically increase the lifespan.

I’m not exaggerating. Some BTI recovery methods are literally inspired by the human sleep cycle. “Circadian Rhythms for Future Resilient Electronic Systems” delves deeply into this topic, with real world examples and experiments. That’s gotta be one of the best book titles

@lauriewired If it weren't you posting this I would say this sounds like total bullshit. Fascinating.

@lauriewired 😔 So you're telling me data centers are CPU-work camps??!

@lauriewired Modern CPUs also have all kinds of aging sensors that detect process and technology related changes over the lifetime, and adjust performance accordingly to maintain correctness

@lauriewired @grok I think you get a bigger benefit by just keeping the computer on 24/7 so you're not stressing it by turning it on and off daily, what is the truth?

@lauriewired @bryan_johnson

@lauriewired Me who keeps their PC running constantly.

@lauriewired there isn’t straight lines in the universe

@lauriewired Oh really?????????????????

@lauriewired What am I seeing in the left image

@lauriewired Tech bro discovers thermal expansion and contraction.

@lauriewired No way bro gave me self help advice using computers as an example

@lauriewired Now talk about when GPUs sleep so hard they shatter due to the macro level thermal stresses as the die and PCB cool at different rates.

@lauriewired .... Sleep?

@lauriewired A sad but true fact that haunts me.

@lauriewired This is incredibly beautiful. We made rocks think and yet they are beholden to the same limitations as us: cannot run 24/7, needs rest in order to work and live best

@lauriewired So what youre saying is leaving my PC on overnight is actually bad lol

@lauriewired so @bryan_johnson tell your computer to sleep well too

@lauriewired this is

@lauriewired I’ve never had a CPU die on me; they just became obsolete. GPU, PSU, motherboard, peripherals... yes, but never CPU. They just keep working, if I don't mind sticking to Win95, 98, XP, that is...

@lauriewired now I'm worried using my brain too much

@lauriewired so mosfet "heal" as well? I've swear I've heavily damaged them before, and if you wait a day or so they just start working again.

@lauriewired And now windows/Microsoft won't allow your system to sleep, there are now different sleep modes and whatnot that makes it harder for CPUs to just sleep

@lauriewired Is closing my MacBook enough to give them the rest they need?

@lauriewired mom was right about letting the computer rest

@lauriewired nah, the PC stays on 24/7

@lauriewired Someday, perhaps in the not too distant future, computing devices will be at their core a self-healing holographic gel matrix.

@lauriewired Fascinating! The idea that CPUs can recover during idle time due to Bias Temperature Instability (BTI) is like a form of ‘sleep.’ It’s amazing how stress removal helps reverse transistor degradation. Technology often has its own version of healing!

@lauriewired organismic healing goes a lot further than CPU "healing", to such degree they’re two different things. like someone said, an organism is like a house of cards that’s built in such a way that whenever you cut/burn/remove a card the rest tend to fall back into the ‘house’ shape 1/2

@lauriewired I have a bad cpu that has issues on its igpu module. When i use the igpu, it goes haywire and putting it to rest basically fixes it. I very much believe this as i have a first hand experience

@lauriewired So I should shut my PC off at night

@lauriewired On a totaly unrelated story, friend and I once played hockey on concrete in the basement with a P3, and after spending an hour unbending all the pins, the damn thing still worked, booted to OS, and still BSOD in Counterstrike like it did before to deserve its treatment.

@lauriewired I sing lullabies to my GPUs before shutting down. Rest well and get some zzzzs. We've got a lot of compute to do in the morning