[liquidzoot]

You should be careful with this, you'll wear a hole in your instruction set.

[sonthonax]

Dumb question, could that actually happen? Could you actually use a particular set of transistors so much with this that they break?

[slacka]

This wouldn't do any noticeable damage. Modern CPUs have excellent thermal management. As far a wear goes, a hot spot in chip would in theory slightly decrease the long life span of a CPU.

If you expanded your question to hardware in the computer, then yes you can easily cause damage. BIOS’s can be flashed to make the system unbootable or overclock/stress components. Back in the bad old days of Linux, you could easily damage your monitor with the wrong xorg.conf settings.

Your question got me thinking what’s the MTBF of modern CPUs? My google-fu failed me finding any reliable source of this, but I’m sure it’s long, 10+ years.

[detaro]

Yes, but you probably need something more sophisticated than just running the same instruction type over and over again: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2744295.2724718

[amelius]

Well, I think this can be answered by considering that even under normal conditions there are transistors that are used as much as in your hypothetical scenario. For example, the instruction decoding logic is invoked for every instruction. Since all logic transistors are the same (afaik), I don't think that using one type of instruction would significantly reduce the life-time of your CPU.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Probably not for MOV, given x86 uses it a heck of a lot anyway, so surely processors are already equipped to handle it.

[mappu]

You should also regularly rotate your CPU in its socket, to ensure all the cores wear evenly.

[koytch]

Uhm, not really, but you might make 20 smaller ones.

http://x86.renejeschke.de/html/file_module_x86_id_176.html