On Maw, 2004-04-13 at 18:37, David Boyes wrote: > Intel platforms will always come out ahead. If you're trying to solve > I/O intensive problems, or balance a lot of different work on the same > machine, then Intel systems don't do as well. It depends on the > workload.
Another consideration is uptime and how important the right answer is. x86 doesn't generally have all the layers of ECC that mainframe has, although this is changing. By way of an I/O example, on an I/O heavy x86 server (web/ftp mirror etc) benchmarks I did showed that even though it had four independant raid disks on four controller channels the cheapo 533Mhz VIA C3 processor stuck in it was two or three times more than needed to maintain throughput. You can get better throughput on modern PC's (eg the Tyan 2880 boards with onboard PCI/X 64bit 100Mhz hardware raid controllers and dual 128bit memory channels) but it does cost a bit more than a generic PC ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
