I have to disagree, I've gone through this with many of our clients over the years on lots of platforms, and the end result has always been more is better but not always bigger is better. It all goes by what you can afford though. I would rather see a constrained multi-processor than a constrained single processor.
Without knowing the entire workload it's difficult to give you the exact numbers, but from just about any viewpoint, having multiple processors is just about always going to be better. What vendor was pushing the big-UP thing? It sounds pretty dubious to me, but maybe there is some really good reason (though I doubt it). Possibly they are forgetting about all the other stuff going on in the processor. There is more than just a single address space to worry about. Doing two things at once, albeit a little more slowly is pretty much always going to put you ahead of doing one thing at a time a little faster. Especially as you add more functions to be accomplished that can run in parallel, the benefits, (of multiple processors) will get larger and larger. Even when dealing on a PC platform, most geeks will tell you that a dual core pentium at 2.4 Ghz is a whole lot better than a 3.2 Ghz single pentium. the difference in speed between the multi-processors and single processors speeds would have to be VERY large to actually benefit from the single. Comparing a sigle processor Z9 to a 2-processor z/800 would result in a comparison where the single would win, but in this case you're actually comparing on the same platform type, so unless you were really going to sub-capacity the processors down really far, you would have to get a bigger bang from more processors than from a single. Brian ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
