On Saturday, 10/13/2007 at 06:03 EDT, "McKown, John" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >3) The cycle time is 4GHz+ and just as with MIPS, GHz is a > >"meaningless indicator of processor speed". > > True, but we will be able to shut the Intel bigots up just by saying > that our CPU is 4 Ghz and not a paltry 3 Ghz like their's. Granted, > meaningless, but it still will be nice.
(sigh) I feel like saying to them, "Is your fave machine so one-dimensional that all you can ever talk about is the frequency of the oscillator on the CPU chip? Describe for me, please, the business value of 1 MHz. I will wait.... Still waiting... Hello? Is anyone there? Hello?" So we probably *don't* want to play up the 4 GHz because in 6 months, *they'll* have 4 GHz, and then where will we be? I suppose we should knuckle down and define a new eHG (e-holy grail) that is a function of CPU speed, disk access time, bus latency, memory latency, number of peripherals, wind direction, amount of local disk storage, number of tape drives, power consumption (kwh), mean age of programmers who wrote the code you're running, and the number of cubic meters it all occupies based on cabinet dimensions, the air-speed of an unladen *African* swallow (in April, of course), and total length of cables. Warning: If we could have such a number, it would probably be ignored in favor of CPU speed. Alan Altmark z/VM Development IBM Endicott
