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| | Ed Gould wrote: | |> Now I know I am out of date on this but somewhere in the mists of |> time, I could swear that IBM came out saying that anthing above 18(??? |> this is a number I am not sure of) was not good, in fact it was bad as |> the interprocessor costs was more overhead than they were worth. |> They sited some physics law (IFIRC) . There is another Reason for the restriction that Ed Gould remembers: Mathematics. Or more specific: Queuing Theory. Some twenty years ago I was labouring through some IBM manuals (those orange coloured technical bulletins) about control flow, balanced system, queuing, etc, and at that time they (IBM) used the basic Erlang formulas for response time prediction for machines with n CPUs/servers. And the mathematical model they used _at that time_ yielded little, if any, additional throughput if you added more processors once you had 6 or eight already installed. They called it the "law of diminishing returns" or so, every additional processor giving you less addition processing power than the previously added processor. - -- ~ With kind Regards |\ _,,,---,,_ ~ ZZZzz /,`.-'`' -. ;-;;, ~ Volker Bandke |,4- ) )-,_. ,\ ( `'-' ~ (BSP GmbH) '---''(_/--' `-'\_) ~ One organism, one vote. ~ (Another Wisdom from my fortune cookie jar) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFC55PKHm2sbKEAXTARAn83AJ45BOT6cvCRw2hnIyv5nGYtxrdmaQCfSzxc fq85/E5vvmUtwEmiqOHf8NE= =VpYx -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
