Topic: Butterfly Labs is going to give lifetime warranty - page 3. (Read 7610 times)

Actually if you know how hardware functions, a 1GHz CPU will always switch the gates at that frequency when the PC is powered on, once the operating system is loaded it will send a continuous off command to stop the switching of the unused gates when there is nothing to process. So really it makes no difference whether the CPU is processing or is in pre-OS state and switching anyway.

Excess heat and current is what degrades the silicon.

Mining wreaks havoc on gates, whether it's a CPU, GPU, FPGA, or ASIC. Mining absolutely hammers it, 24/7/365. Mining will wear out any device far faster than normal usage.

Warranties/support can also put a company out of business. If anyone remembers Quantex/Cybermax computers in the early 2000's. They had good products at a great price, won lots of awards. Their supplier went out of business and then so did they. Leaving many people without support and with broken equipment

Electronics follow the bathtub failure model. Either they fail immediately, or after a very very long time. If you test the stuff before shipping you can be pretty much sure about the mean time before failure (mtbf).

Some electronics include moving parts. Those can fail pretty much at any time.

Some electronics are based on chemistry, like electrolyte caps. Those dry out in decades.

Some electronics have wear, think cells in an SSD with limited (although still in the thousands and tens of thousands) number of write cycles.

Some electronics are basically just fixed gates. Like ASICs. They don't wear, and the likelihood of one failing is incredibly small.

/defxor

Anecdote: At home I have an 1987 Atari ST, including a SM124 monochrome monitor and an RLL MFM 30GB hard disk in working condition. The picture quality is slightly unstable, most likely due to the caps in the PSU needing to be exchanged.

AMEN.

Yes...in fact, I just put in for an RMA with Crucial yesterday. Tried putting a stick I had laying around in my mining rig the other day. It locked up when I tried starting bitcoind, and kept either locking up or rebooting on fsck. Took it back out, fsck completed, and it's been OK since.

Before that, some memory in my work computer crapped out and needed replacement.

(Also, top-posting's bad, m'kay?)

On VRMs - this is the primary point of failure on *most* hardware, it might raise costs slightly to have multiples - but I think it's going to make for a better product in the long run - imagine 1 vrm fails, the others should still function only reducing the hashing by a percentage. Suppose one of 8 chips attached to a VRM fails, you'll probably end up frying the other chips.

It seems like they took the more expensive but more reliable route, started with a small single unit and added more of that module to the board.

LOL    BFL is the first company in history which gives a lifetime warranty on product that does not exist and has not been tested. This is a very impressive....  

Compared to the BFL companies such as Intel, Nvidia, AMD looks pathetic

Okay, let's think about this for a minute...

What other highly complicated electronic device, marketed to the consumer gets sold with a free >5 year warranty?

This is BFL's first generation ASIC design. Not some small change to an existing, proven, reliable design.
It's an untested product. Not one device has been shipped to customer yet.

And they're suddently offering a unlimited "lifetime" warranty at no added cost.

They have no data on failure rates. What is the MTBF of the BFL SCs?
What is the rate of defective products from manufacturing? Is it 1/10 or 1/100000?
Who knows? Nobody knows. Because this data cannot exist yet.

The thing is, hardware design is hard, to the point that even Intel fucks up badly from time to time,
to the point that they have to issue total and hence extremely expensive recalls.

Any number of things can happen. Especially with a brand new design.
Especially when rolling out four products simultaneously. Especially for a 22 person company.

Bugs can be subtle, yet fatal. Components may not play along nicely.
Problems can take time to surface. Problems aren't always detected in testing.

Does BFL have the appropriate insurance in place in case something bad happens? (How much would that cost?)

At first glance, I fail to see see how this makes any economic sense.
(Except of course from a pre-order / marketing / sales perspective.)

Here's a final question, left simply as an exercise to the reader:
What would the world have to look like for this "risk free gift" to make sense?

Like many statements from BFL - sketchy, suspicious and undefined.

20+ years in electronics and computer related fields here: I've seen like 2 sticks of dead RAM ever. I'd say we're both outliers of the real data.

Heat and moving parts are the usual culprits. So I'd say hard drives and power supplies as well. I wouldn't say capacitors are generally likely to fail, but if you specify electrolytic caps, that's a whole different story.

Whenever I read a review on Newegg that says an item was DOA, I laugh because they almost certainly broke it themselves.