Comment by trenchpilgrim

1 day ago

You are confusing depreciation (which is mostly driven by tax reasons) with service lifecycle.

And you're confusing all of these terms. The "3 years" is the standard warranty and typically gets extended to 5 years (and maybe 7 or 8 depending on the vendor). This is consistent with Dell PowerEdge, HP ProLiant, etc. servers. Nvidia GPUs on the other hand...there likely could be different terms, but idk because they are not typical purchases for 95% of the companies who make server hardware purchases.

Source - I regularly work with IT departments and review their contracts as part of diligence.

  • Nobody in this thread has mentioned warranty periods. The original comment was about the hardware lifecycle, claiming the hardware was only commercially viable for months. The 3 year number that people are tossing around came from a discredited interview that made the rounds on social media a while back: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/datacenter-g...

    • You're proving my point. Hardware's lifecycle is based on warranty - that's it.

      The parent comment was:

      > Data centre hardware is more like 3 years.

      That comment is actually referencing the standard warranty period (which is indeed typically 3 years), which may or may not be consistent with the useful life of server hardware (which is much more subjective and varies based on appliance).

      2 replies →

A lot of these tax codes were written when computers were outdated within a year. The turnover of computers slowed a lot in the last two decades, but the tax codes haven’t changed.