On Tue, 18 Feb 2003 00:19:12 -0500, Adam Thornton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 02:36:21AM +0200, Tzafrir Cohen wrote: >> Replace your faulty hardware. It's cheap. >> Or spend a bit more, and get a case without those cooling problems. > >Yes, of course it's cheap. 'S'why I bought it. And I'll buy a new >machine eventually, at a similarly low price point, because I'm cheap. > >Point is, *most* PC hardware is cheap. Because it, you know, costs less >that way. > >Adam I puzzled about all this for a long time. One example was a 4341 versus a Vax/780. The performance sheets I looked at said they were about equal in performance. But the 4341 was much more capable in real work situations, given equal workload. Eventually I noticed that the 4341 could do about 10 times the I/O (megabytes per second) compared to the Vax machine. Vax was limited to about 100K bytes per second and 4341 was 1meg bytes per second. So I propose that when analysing different architectures we go beyond simple CPU benchmarks and also calculated the 1) memory bandwidth and 2) I/O bandwidth. So that hot PC might be great for CPU but might be left in the dust in memory bandwidth and I/O bandwidth. That type of analysis would explain why a 168 was so capable even though the CPU benchmark (compared to a 2Ghz Intel) would predict otherwise. Programming efficiency probably has a measurable effect too... C++ versus hand crafted assembler can easily add a 5-10 times efficiency differential in my experience. Hey - IBM - I figured out that when I was working for IBM Research in Yorktown in 1983-88 - so if someone wants to grab the idea and use it in marketting... it's yours. I imagine a bit heavy tank with 2000 horsepower duking it out with a compact... half plastic... auto. <grin> john
