discrete transistors

< From: William Donzelli &lt;william(a)ans.net&gt; < < Sure, a Dell Pentium machine might be plenty fast by the book, but simpl < put, it could not even come close to sustaining that speed (140 Mflops f < the Cray-1). A superfast CPU will always loose to slow I/O. < < Its all in the architecture... yes, steaming along at 140MFLOPS only to slam into the IO bus that if ISA *may* be able to sustain 16mb/s. PCI may be faster, I'd suspect in the 30+mb/s range (unknown to me). Anyhow being able to gind lots of numbers is limited by memory bandwidth and maybe disk IO bandwidth and PCs are not notably fast in that depatment. Cray and those other machines were possibly a bit slower but they didn't have that I/O bottlenecks. Allison