🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991May7.130302.22332@vlsi.waterloo.edu> ward@vlsi.waterloo.edu (Paul Ward) writes:
>  
> A meaningless question - how can you possibly compare price performance of
> a workstation (typically a single or a few user machine) with an IBM mainframe
> which can support 400+ users concurrently?  If anything, the major difference
> between PCs, workstations, minis and mainframes is the IO bandwidth, not
> the processor performance.  What good is 500 MIPS and 50 MFLOPS if you are
> waiting so long for an I/O operation to complete that the real performance is
> ~5 MIPS and 0.5 MFLOPS.  (The same applies to the memory subsystem - you have
 
It's not entirely meaningless.  Many jobs are CPU, not I/O bound. 
Compatibility aside, you would have to be a fool to use an IBM mainframe
for that.   They don't even come close to competitive with workstations on
CPU performance.  Can *all* the price performance difference be attributed
to the presence or absence of a high speed IO system?  
 
Also, is there anything to prohibit a RISC based machine from having a high
speed IO subsystem?  Would adding this make the machine cost as much as a
3090?
  
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