On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 8:43 PM, Lindy Mayfield <lindy.mayfi...@ssf.sas.com> wrote:
>This has been a very interesting thread for me. If I remember correctly from >the time I saw the z/10 with plexiglass outsides and a hardware guy there to >explain what was what, and one of the things he told me was the cpu speed was >(IIRC) 4.77GHz. >My laptop has a dual core 1.99GHz. >You already see where I'm going with this. How does a z/10 get so much more >done? Forgive me for my math and analytical skills, but seems like 4 laptops >could equal the speed of a 1 cpu z/10. There is a huge chunk of this equation >that I'm totally missing. How does a z/10 get so much more done? The usual metaphor is that four Tauruses do not a semi make, even though the acreage and gas mileage are comparable (no, I'm not prepared to claim that "4" or "Tauruses" are necessarily the right substitutions, but you get my point). (Note that the converse [inverse? perverse?] is also true: most people wouldn't *want* to use a z10 for all daily computing use -- Web browsing, photo editing, etc.) z10s (not z/10s -- hardware not software, no slash) "get more* done" because of: - hardware design: I/O is offloaded better, multitasking is more efficient, etc. - software design: those of us who grew up counting bits and storing flags in the top byte of a 24-bit address to save memory are pretty far from the GUI kids whose "hello world" application occupies 200KB+, and so are our applications I could go on, but the bottom line is, "different design, different targets, different results". If you look at carefully written PC software like, say, Steve Gibson's stuff (www.grc.com -- not a plug, just an example that comes to mind), you'll see incredibly rich and powerful stuff that fits in the palm of your PC's hand, so to speak. http://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm has dozens of apps, most in the 25K (yes, K!) range. So it isn't impossible to write tight software for PCs, just discouraged by the apparent lack of need and ubiquity of IDEs that produce bloat. ...phsiii *FSVO "more": often just "different". As noted above, playing MP3s or editing photos on a z would be suboptimal at best. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
