[ale] sorta [OT] IO vs clock cycles

[Larry Grenevitch]

To reply to the mainframe question.
CPU speed is only one factor.  Several years ago I worked in a shop that sold 
both AIX and SCO Unix boxes.  A 2 year old AIX box still beat out the latest 
PC with on cache boards etc..  Why, IO, most PC boards are 16 bit with PCI 
there is now 64 bit boards, on AIX and I am sure the mainframes you have 512 
bit IO boards.  Or to put it another way, when your PC has gotten 16 bits [2 
bytes of information] your mainframe transfered 512 bits or 64 bytes of 
information.  And it is things like that all through out the system from IO 
to memory.  That is why PCs are not really scallable, they just don't have 
the base engineering.

On Thursday 07 November 2002 02:36 pm, Cade Thacker wrote:
> Need a little bit of knowledge from you guys/gals. I got in a discussion
> about running Java in an enterprise system, and one of the gentlemen I
> repect a great deal said that Java would be much happier running on an NT
> box with a very high clock cycle, then a Unix work horse from IBM. His
> reasoning was that the Unix box is built(and build well) for IO intensive
> tasks, DB type stuff, where NT is build to take advantage of clock speed.
> Therefore the JVM would be happier on NT.
>
> On the same topic, we always hear that the mainframe downstairs has less
> horse power then our PCs, but yet the mainframe handles Millions of
> transactions a second, and my PC dogs out running 5 browsers at once.
> Please explain.
>
> Where do you guys think linux would fall in this debate?
>
> Thanks guys, and as always looking forward to your answers.
>
>
> --cade
>
> On Linux vs Windows
> ==================
> Remember, amateurs built the Ark, Professionals built the Titanic!
> ==================
>
>
>
>
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