On Feb 9, 2005, at 10:36 PM, Wade Curry wrote:
I confess to not being _entirely_ sure what you mean here.. may be terminology, or may be lack of familiarity with the hardware. My perception is that you're talking about a similar situation that I see with mainframes. They can do a tremendous amount of work (lots of transactions), but if you happen to have a linux partition, you can forget about trying to run X (so I'm told). This is something of a paradox... never made any sense to me.
typical PC systems (x86, here) are designed with the emphasis on raw CPU power. They excel at tasks that require heavy crunching. Note that this was not the case for a very long time, however. PC architectures, though, as a whole, have completely sucked eggs when it comes down to moving a lot of data around with minimal (in terms of processing) transformation. This, however, is exactly what mainframes and midframes and minis have been designed to do, which is why they're so much better at throughput-intensive applications than x86, which is better at compute-intensive applications.
Ever notice that when you need a render farm, you end up with lots of "little" x86 boxen loosely couples over a network, but if you need a data farm, you end up with large IBM, Sun or HP systems?
There are still a number of enterprise and academic problem domains where x86 architecture simply will not suffice.
Gregory
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