[colejohnson66]

I'll concede that silicon can wear out over time; it's impossible for it to be immune from happening, and I wasn't speaking in absolutes. But as you mention, it's one of scale. I'm curious how likely a second hand GPU from a cryptominer is affected.

[w1nk]

So that's actually one of the awful implications of this paper. It's probably actually happening at a rate higher than would be noticed by humans.

If a given piece of silicon is hosing up a GEMM (matrix multiply), in graphics scenarios this may be invisible to the human eye as it could potentially just introduce artifacts in a scene rendering that could be entirely ephemeral to the frame.

In the case of crypto mining though, it's completely possible (probable?) that there are GPUs that can't possibly ever calculate a proper SHA3 hash (see the paper on AES instructions that fail in symmetric ways).