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There was a question here on SU, if a CPU can age: Is the performance of a CPU affected as it ages? the answer in short No

I read a newspaper article (unfortunately in German) referencing a research paper, that CPUs in fact, just like any other integrated circuit, would age and with the correct exploit, this aging can be accelerated. The paper, MAGIC: Malicious Aging in Circuits/Cores can be found here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2744295.2724718

While the newspaper article was way too simplistic, I don't have access to the paper and the description of the underlying phenomena, Negative-bias temperature instability on Wikipedia is again out of my league.

So the question(s):

  • Is NBTI (Negative-bias temperature instability) something a layperson would call "CPU aging"?
  • How does it work? (in simple terms, and specific to these days CPUs, no copy paste of the wiki article)
  • Is for NBTI relevant, if the CPU is running most of its life at ~0% or ~100%?
  • Could CPUs actually get noticeably slower because of it over a period of 5-10 years, or would this simply either destroy the CPU eventually, or otherwise barely affect it at all?
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  • As someone who has run computers to age related destruction, chances are, entirely unscientifically, you'll blow a cap, or have hard drive failure or have your processor stomped by a kaiju far before this could happen.
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Oct 25, 2015 at 23:00
  • Well I do have some computers which are almost 10 years old, yes they mostly have new hard drives in them but CPU and memory still work - although they seem terribly slow even with the fastest LXDE based distribution. Now it could be that I just got used to much faster computers and those were always crap, but obviously answering the question if CPUs age with a simple now is way too simplistic
    – peter
    Oct 25, 2015 at 23:38
  • In general, a CPU works or it doesn't work... there is no gradual "slowdown" with age. That said, eventually any IC or even discrete transistor will stop working due to diffusion of atoms across the barrier... but eventually may mean thousands of years, or perhaps sometime before the heat-death of the universe.
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Oct 26, 2015 at 0:10

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