Amazon extends the life of its servers to six years, expects $900m benefit in 90 days Amazon.com has completed a "useful life study" for its servers and decided they can be used for an extra year – taking the working life from five to six years. It predicts the change will contribute $900 million to net income in Q1 of 2024 alone. The change came into effect on January 1 and follows a 2022 decision to extend …
For single threaded application, CPUs haven't really progressed much in the past decade (Except maybe larger chaces). Only multithreaded applications notice a difference due to the increase in cores: But those apps have to be written well to scale efficently beyond a couple of cores.
Intel portfolio's single-thread performance saw 2,2-fold increase from i7-4790K (released 2014Q2) to i9-13900KS (2023Q1) during the past decade (or 9 years ~ a novade?). Admittingly, multi-core performance improvement of these same CPUs were 5-fold i.e. more than double that of the single-core performance improvement.
Two seconds at google and:
"Net income is what a business or individual makes after taxes, deductions, and other expenses are taken out, In business, net income is what a company has left after all expenses are subtracted, including taxes, wages, and the cost of goods."
In accounting terms, if an asset costs £10K when initially bought new, and is written down over say 5 years, then £2K is written off its value each year, at the 5th year once fully written down, it is worth £0 to the business + whatever value it might have as second user kit. Generally the market for used/old servers is pretty marginal since few organisations want to be bothered with out-of-warranty kit with the cost and risk of transportation to new facility - so that old server is maybe worth £500 on the open market. Many/most big companies destroy kit rather than re-sell it.
But if you sweat the asset and keep it in service a couple of extra years and have an inrastructure that allows for failure without no reduction in service, then that old server is paying for itself at something below £2K per year - great business sense, good for the environment - nobody loses - and Cloud implementations offer this. It's a bit like you or me reaching retirement age, but being required to pay your employer to continue working there, albeit doing to do a slightly less intensive job. Fortunately, computers don't have rights.
The capex budget has been frozen for years where I work, so our *newest* server is about 6 years old. Held together with lots of redundancy and good (tested) backups! I guess there's a cutoff where the increased power consumption relative to new kit exceeds the environmental and financial impact of throwing the old server away and buying a new one.
We bought a 20 core server end 2022.
We bought a 40 core server end 2023 for the same money with more disk.
The 20 core is now the fail over server.
We been buying referb kit at a fraction of new price. Both the servers were only a few months old.
We did the sums and it's cheaper for us to have in house. We can't use the cloud in any case as our customers would not be happy.
The biggest costs is the M$ licence, which is based on cores.
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