Paul, Re: "Intel will market the low cost/low priced Celeron to maintain market share at the low end - and
make decent profits - and reap the entire high end's profits, as you noted, without real
competition."
Not quite. We've been through this before, but...System 390 will continue to sell very well for the following reasons:
1. Only family that runs MVS and VM. Value of installed software base that requires MVS or VM must be into the trillions of dollars by now.
2. Scalability. Unknown if NT 5.0 is really going to improve this enough to make NT a serious enterprise OS. S390 scales to about 80% with up to 12 CPU's.
3. I/O bandwidth. Up to 512 channels combination between parallel OEMI and fiber optic (ESCON).
4. RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) including data integrity testing on every instruction, ECC on all caches, mainstore, extended store and channels, concurrent maintenance (Intel is addressing this area via things like failover and Landesk). Re ECC, I know they also put ECC into one of the PII's.
5. Security. Even Berkeley students or graduates haven't broken into one of these. Hardware encryption on all I/O transactions.
6. CMOS mainframes have caught up and surpassed the fastest ECL machines ever, at 1/7th the footprint, 1/7th the power (KVA). All this and they are priced at about one fourth the cost per MIP as the old ECL machines.
7. Performance of S390 will stay ahead. We're not standing still either. At 0.25 micron gate lengths/line widths now.
OK, enough. I do agree that Merced will put major hurt on everything below S390.
Tony |
