On Sun, 2002-05-26 at 20:31, Phil Payne wrote: > No - you're a power user - the sort of person who would have gone out to buy a 387. >Although > there seem to be lots of power users about, that's because they inhabit similar >places. A few > thousand or a few tens of thousands at most - compared with tems of millions of >processors > shipped.
There were more copies of quake sold than that. By your definition they are all power users. > > throughput. They won't be until those features like the FPU become > > economical using either hardware or software to drop into mainstream > > cheap processor silicon. > > The trend is the other way. Major manufacturers are looking at simply >overconfiguring by a > large percentage and then disabling broken bits in software. Such machines will >never be > repaired. IBM's proposed 'Icecube' design almost precludes repair. Thats the same trend. Note I very carefully said _or_ software. The whole self routing chip stuff is almost twenty years old so its about time someone got it to work on useful components. > I don't see that as an issue. IBM has established comparative benchmarks between >its own > products - if you have one, you can relate it to other similar products. LSPR is >the best > example, though even there things like buffer pool redefinitiuons tend to blur the >numbers. > But who should verify and who arbitrate over the inevitable arguments? Vendor provided comparisons between its own products. Comparisons by Ford between Ford cards don't tell you anything about whether its a Porsche or Bicycle equivalent. And *no* credible mainstream computing journalist will trust a vendor provided benchmark. They've seen enough such material, most of which appears to be compost. Until the mainframe folks and the IBM marketing folks involved with it can understand the mainstream viewpoint, and its cynicism of vendor provided data I don't see the coverage of S/390 improving one iota.
