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From: Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Computer architects leaving Intel...
Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2024 13:13:20 -0000 (UTC)
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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.