25 Oct
1999
25 Oct
'99
4:37 a.m.
Mark Green <mark(a)cs.ualberta.ca> wrote:
Note that in the above comments I said PC, I did not say
server. I'm talking about a PC architecture and not the
particular chip, such as an Intel chip. I have yet to see
a PC (as in workstation) have more than 2 CPUs. I can
get 2 CPU systems from the likes of HP, DELL, whoever gets
SGIs NT line, etc. But thats where it ends. On a workstation,
such as SUN, SGI, HP and probably others I can scale above
2 CPUs.
The PC architecture was designed to be low cost. It works
very well that way, but you can't say its the best architecture
for everything (which is the point being discussed). At some
point you need to go to multiple busses, multiple processors,
interleaved memory architectures, etc.
The problems is equivalent hardware. You
can't configure a PC
like a VAX, they are two different types of machines. A PC
is tuned for a single user, while a VAX is tuned for many users.
These are very different machine configurations, and even the latest
PC would have no hope of keeping up to a decade old VAX running
a large multiuser application.
False. I have personal experience with PCs serving the same kind
of workload you describe of VAXen, and they work fine.
Many of the PC manufacturers
have tried to scale PCs to this level and they have all failed.
Compaq's high-end x86 based servers don't seem to have failed. single bus systems like the PC can't scale to
the performance required.
The bus in a modern PC isn't the issue. It's comparable to what's
in most workstations.
The problem is the software architecture. Despite all of the ballyhoo
surrounding MS Windows NT, the reality is that it is too bloated and
inefficient to support enterprise applications.
I'll agree with you that high-end server class machines today
are more powerful, have higher bandwidth busses, and more busses,
than most PCs. But how could it be otherwise? Anyhow, that's not what
this discussion was about.
The claim was that a 486DX2/66 PC could outperform a VAX 8650. And so
far, no one has refuted that claim, though many people seem to have
decided that it must be false, and given specious arguments as supposed
proof. Apparently there is some sort of near-religious belief that a
minicomputer (regardless of how old it is) MUST have better performance
than a PC.
You may be arguing that, and I agree with your point. Its just
comments like the PC architecture can outrun anything that I
find hard to take. Some of these statements may have come out
in the heat of the arguments.
--
Dr. Mark Green mark(a)cs.ualberta.ca
Professor (780) 492-4584
Director, Research Institute for Multimedia Systems (RIMS)
Department of Computing Science (780) 492-1071 (FAX)
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H1, Canada