John H. Robinson, IV wrote:
Did you look at those price tags? Remember: performance is half of
price/performance. If you ignore price, then we can all drive Ferraris!
(/me notes the Toyota Corolla sitting in the parking lot)
Performance isn't always measured in speed. To me the PPC is like an
over the road truck, and the x86 is more like a pickup truck. For the
tasks that they are most suited for, they do great, but for other tasks
they are just adequate. If you want to haul a boat, use the pickup
truck, not because the over the road truck can't do it, but because it
is poorly suited for the task. If you are hauling 5 boats to a boat
show, then the over the road truck is the right tool. As computers
become faster the argument over RISC vs CISC seems to be more shallow,
but it still holds for heavy work loads. With CISC you are often
required to have more of them to handle heavy data loads, while with
RISC you take a quick performance drop, but it levels off quickly,
making it better suited for most server environments. The costs of
Intel tend to be that you must have more of them. These increases
maintenance costs. This would be like having 5 pickup trucks to haul
the 5 boats in lieu of making 5 trips. Now throw into the mix that you
have increased the odds of a single boat reaching its destination,
because the odds of one truck breaking down are greater than five trucks
breaking down en route, and have the benefit of having multiple
trucks(servers). There are tangible and intangible costs involved, and
they have to be measured when choosing a platform. The great thing is
Linux is usually on option on all platforms.
--
"You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I'm not hungry enough
to eat six."
--Yogi Bera
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