No, it's not at all misleading (CA's prediction that 2009 shipped incremental mainframe MIPS will exceed all installed mainframe MIPS in 2000). For at least one simple reason: nobody buys mainframe MIPS to let them sit idle. They are the most highly utilized CPUs on the planet, running an average of 80-plus percent busy for their entire lives. (And, if anything, mainframe CPU percentage utilization has been trending upward over time as customers get more sophisticated and more efficient.)
Thus "MIPS," at least in this context, is an entirely legitimate and proper way to view mainframe growth. It's not the *only* way, but it has ample validity. MIPS sales are extremely highly correlated with actual business use. Your desktop PC (or laptop) is entirely different. It spends almost its entire life idling. Thus to measure PC growth you have to use a different metric besides installed (or incremental) MIPS. Number of PCs (or PC users) is a typical measure. So yes, my reaction still applies: "Wow." - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan / Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
