# Does running my CPU at 100% shorten its life?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-running-my-cpu-at-100-shorten-its-life/280805>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [December 20, 2004, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-running-my-cpu-at-100-shorten-its-life/280805 "2004-12-20T15:50:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![by-tor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/by-tor/32/266_2.png) [@by-tor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/by-tor)\
**Post date:** [December 22, 2004, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-running-my-cpu-at-100-shorten-its-life/280805/21 "2004-12-22T05:06:00Z")

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Thanks JohnClay, I never use ctrl-alt-del because I have a freeware taskmanager but I will check it out!

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**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\
**Post date:** [December 22, 2004, 8:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-running-my-cpu-at-100-shorten-its-life/280805/22 "2004-12-22T08:15:54Z")

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> [@Whack-a-Mole](#):
>
> Partly true. Certainly how it was but the new Pentium processors with Hyperthreading in them can actually process multiple threads simultaneously as if there were more than one processor in the system.

Well, in a sense this is letting multiple processes run without the overhead of context switching. True parallelism is here in the UltraSparcIV, which has two Sparc CPUs on one chip. Niagara, which is on its way, has I think 8, each of which can handle two threads. Intel has just decided to go this way.

However, in a sense all processors run more than one instruction at a time through pipelining. Since each CISC instruction takes more than one clock, it goes through several stages of a pipeline, followed by others - so three or four may be executing at once. Also, there are often multiple copies of units like multipliers which take a long time to complete, so more than one multiply can be happening at time. Other instructions may be waiting for a cache miss.

But if you are in an idle loop, not much of anything is happening at the moment.

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**Author:** ![mks57](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b9bd4f/32.png) [@mks57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mks57)\
**Post date:** [December 24, 2004, 1:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-running-my-cpu-at-100-shorten-its-life/280805/23 "2004-12-24T01:29:00Z")

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> [@InvisibleWombat](#):
>
> What does this mean in terms of lifespan? We’re dealing with a single solid-state device. It’s not like a disk drive, which contains a motor. The paths in a CPU chip don’t wear out because of the number of electrons traversing them. The enemy of electronics is heat. Each time a transistor changes state, heat is generated.

With modern chips, [electromigration](http://www.csl.mete.metu.edu.tr/Electromigration/emig.htm) is a real concern for the designers. This can cause the interconnects to “wear out” and fail. If the chip is properly designed, it will be replaced long before this becomes a concern, due to the equipment being old or obsolete.

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