is it true that a computer will slow down after it is used for a long time? [closed]

Question

Intel claims that a computer will become slower after it is used for a long time while the power consumption remains almost the same according to some media source.

At first I thought this was just marketing, but then some friend confirmed this is truly the case. I can understand when bicycle is used for a long time the friction increases within the component, but that can be fixed anyways. What about the chips? Is the capacitor that takes longer to charge?

is this really the case or it is just marketing ?

source media material if you can read Chinese

source transistor aging thanks to @sergio

clarification I am definitely not talking about software related stuff, otherwise wont post here.

Answer 1

Well let's just ignore the software bloat aspect of computer slow down and look at things on a piece by piece basis.

CPU, MoBo, Memory like caches and DRAM:

• NO, these are clocked systems and the clock is designed to drive the system just fast enough to make sure that the device finishes one task before starting the next (in simplistic terms). These clocks do drift and age a little, but that is measured in PPM (parts per million) if the part slows down enough that it can't keep up to the clock, then it starts to have major problems. Like most things digital, it runs until it , .... well doesn't.

That really just leaves the HDD:

• It is POSSIBLE that this will slow your machine down. We do know that there can be corruption in the stored bits (bit rot) and the operating system can mostly correct these. But in reality these tend to cascade and then go south very quickly or else they happen at a consistent background rate (which wouldn't affect this premise).

• I would say that there would be some machines that slow down rapidly and spiral out. Otherwise the effect will probably not be noticeable.

On the whole, I'd say nonsense.

Answer 2

There are lots of things that can cause a Windows computer to become slower as you use it, but they're all software-related or related to the interaction of software and hardware.

Additional programs get installed which consume resources (even when they're uninstalled they may leave crap in the registry). Many programs install processes that run at startup and do things like listening on a port or checking for updates.

Disk drives can become fragmented, slowing retrieval. Even single programs that use RAM can require garbage collection and such like as the RAM gets filled and recycled in various sized blocks.

Some people (not me) swear by completely wiping and re-installing Windows and most-used programs from scratch on a clean disk drive. You will definitely see a speed improvement if you've been using the same computer for years without re-installing from scratch.

Answer 3

This discussion became a bit fragmented, I'll try to offer an alternative answer to this. Please, note that the original question mention the chips itself, so abtracting ourselves from all peripherals/sowftware inherited problems, I would say the answer is YES, computers could get slowly and/or present faulty behavour over time due to sillicon aging. As the silicon will loose it's properties over time, due to many factors as heat, the properties of the "internal components" of the processors and othes silicon based chips will gradually decay.

As you can see here, there are many articles studying this phenomenon.

I hope this helps as another piece for this puzzled matter! :)

Answer 4

Anindo Ghosh's discussion of temperature has been rubbished in the comments, but it's definitely a potential issue with computers. Modern systems will have "thermal throttling", which will reduce the clock speed when the die temperature of the CPU is above a limit. The ability of the system to keep cool diminishes with time; thermal paste dries out, dust accumulates on heatsinks, and thermal cycling of the heatsink mounting may worsen the thermal contact.

Most systems will benefit from dusting with compressed air every few months, and I've personally had good results from replacing heatsink thermal paste on overheating systems, especially laptops.

Answer 5

No, it is not true for computers that have the typical, clocked architectures. An asynchronous CPUs real performance would be tied closely to the performance of the silicon and would scale with temperature, logic supply voltage(s) and aging.

It's a rather nice question, in fact: an accurate answer can be one sentence long :)

I stress that the transistor aging will not cause the computer to "slow down". A slowing down would imply that there is a control mechanism that measures CPU performance and slows down the clock sources so as to maintain acceptable performance of the CPU. It must be noted that similar to overclocking, a CPU with aged transistors will not fail outright. It will simply operate at a progressively higher error rate, eventually becoming unusable.

So, my first paragraph stands true whether the CPU exhibits transistor-age-related performance degradation or not.

If your question was about whether the transistors will slow down - please reword it so! You're asking about a computer as a whole, not about what the CPU's transistors might be doing. The transistors may be slowing down, but the computer will operate at its rated clock speeds (thermal and power throttling notwithstanding), with ever rising error rates, until it becomes useless. At that point a user might manually reduce clock multipliers in the BIOS to underclock the core and restore the functionality. I assume here that the highest-clocked circuitry is most prone to the effects of this aging. Only this manual control process will lead from transistor slow-down to a computer slow-down. Absent the control process, no slowing down can be observed by definition. You won't observe a slow down, but you will observe eventually unacceptable error rates - leading to data corruption on writable storage.

Answer 6

Sorry to bump such an old thread. I'll break this down.

Semiconductors have thermal properties and can operate ideally forever if thermal degradation was not an issue.

Say you have a capacitor that goes from 0 volts to source Voltage at time zero

$$V_{source}*u(t) = RC\frac{dV_{capacitor}}{dt}+V_{capacitor}$$

The solution to this equation being

$$V_{cap}(t)=V_{source}*(1-e^{\frac{-t}{RC}})*u(t)$$

Now see the rate of change of the voltage at the capacitor

$$\frac{dV_{cap}}{dt}= \frac{V_{source}}{RC}*e^{\frac{-t}{RC}}$$

Which means as resistance increases (thermal degradation over time) it takes a longer amount of time for each gate to reach a steady state.

So you can bump up your ceiling voltage to compensate, or increase the period. If you do neither, you are just going to have a lot of error correction going on (i.e. lot of unknown values read from your cpu). It is said it takes about 5 time constants (RC) for your capacitor to reach a steady state. So increase your time constant you need to increase your period which reduces your frequency. So age and heat degrade a CPU, indeed making it slower and less accurate.

Also note that by increasing your voltage to compensate, you will increase your heat and accelerate the degradation.