Ellison:
This is good time to back to the NC thread.
Sparc line of chip/workstation were never the performance leader. You don't have to be. DEC Alpha has the best performance look at where they are. Pentium is a 32 bit machine and UltraSparc is a 64 bit machine. Yet in SpecInt Pentium and its follow on will catch up to the RISC based machines. Risc based machine still have the performance advantage in Floating point operations. The Microprocessor Forum has been predicting a demise of Alpha, Mips, etc.
Intel's current margine is obscene. One should never count on the to continue forever. The trick to increase revenue. The drive the margine to a sustainable level and grow.
The word Mainframe is becoming very unclear. It used to mean IBM, Univac, CDC, Honeywell machines. HP, DEC, Data General, etc made Minis. Today we think of any large servers as Mainframes. Looking at those names above you will see what does "drive them nearly out of business" means.
I am more interested in looking at NC. From what I can gather, an NC machine is more or less a Disk less PC. I have not seen one. I have problems that I can not answer hopefully this thread can enlighten me.
In order to understand the NC, I started by looking at what a NC need to be. The NC need to have Ethernet and Modem connections. It will need a monitor. For most of working stiffs it means a 19 inch monitor that cost between $2000 to $3000. When the machine is turned on instead of looking for disk, it sets up a network connection and download the operating system. You are now in business.
1. What this do to the network?
Do you have enough bandwidth? Do you have enough servers? Do you have enough storage space. The network traffic will increase dramnaticaaly. If the bandwidth is not improve we may to work at 2am in the morning like most of the chats on this thread. By the time all that is done are we saving money?
2. Who would use them? I certainly have problem. I like to access software fast, do the work and save. Do I have to wait like the IntraNet?
3. Does this mean Company have to buy software differently? Everyone in the company use the same wordprocessor, same presentation pacakge and same spreadsheet? This is not bad! Automatic update with installations. Well that's nice. Will it save Company money? I doubt it. Since the software companies have to make money, they will figure something out.
If the Java station or other NC have solved these problem, Please let me know. I want to save some money to invest in SUNW.
Cheers |
