🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1k46ioINNijv@fido.asd.sgi.com> gints@prophet.esd.sgi.com (Gints  
Klimanis) writes:
> An Amdahl CEO in yesterday's San Jose Mercury news claimed there was no
> room in the world that could how enough personal computers to match the
> power of an Amdahl mainframe.  Any guesses  as to the # of PC's and disk
> drives required to match this Amdahl Mount Everest of computing?

How do you define "room"? I'm sure the blimp hangar over at Moffet would do  
it. I expect the average machine room you stuff an Amdahl mainframe in could  
hold enouhg PCs to numerically add up to an Amdahl mainframe. Being  
generous, the Mainframe = 1000 SPECMarks (N way multiprocessor) and 10  
Gigabytes/sec of "I/O bandwidth". At 30 SPECMarks per 486 box, thats 33 PCs.  
At 10 Megabytes per second I/O Bandwidth per EISA 486 (a probably bogus  
number) thats 1000 PCs. Assuming 3 cubic feet per PC that's somewhere  
between 100 and 3,000 cubic feet. You can put 1 or 2 gigs of disk in each PC  
to take care of the disk farm. Then just pile all them PC's up floor to  
celing and you're ready to do some real computin'!

Comments like this indicate that the big iron boys are pretty desperate.  
They are fighting the dynamics of the market. There are *relatively* few  
problems that require "mainframe power." Over time mainframes must either  
become cheaper or more powerful. More powerful is limited because there are  
fewer and fewer problems that require that kind of power and it becomes  
harder and harder to make the machine more powerful. Cheaper is a problem  
because the margins go down and a lot of a mainframe's costs are not  
hardware oriented. (I.e. service, paying for the space and other central  
facilities required.)
--
Zalman Stern		   zalman@adobe.com		    (415) 962 3824
Adobe Systems, 1585 Charleston Rd., POB 7900, Mountain View, CA 94039-7900
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