Tenchusatsu, I beg to differ with<Xeon is a huge price/performance advantage over RISC workstations.>
Not so, in my experience. The big price/performance advantage comes mostly from running X-86 instruction set/MS compatible software, which is much cheaper, and more available than the equivalent UNIX/LINUX/HPUX/SOLARIS/etc. semi proprietary stuff.
A simple example is the Word/WordPerfect combo Vs the UNIX 'Desk top Publishing' software packages which wind up costing several hundred dollars per work station and require specific training for each of the newbies coming out of school(who already know word).
Another advantage is that X-86 is X-86 while UNIX is not SOLARIS, etc. More training problems, and each time the user community bids for machines you wind up custom porting a batch of home grown software to a different OS platform -- more headaches, since database X on one OS doesn't necessarily produce the same result set on another OS for a given complex query, of which most applications have at least hundreds and many tens of thousands, all of which have to be tested and verified.
Also, C on HP is different than C on Solaris, C on DEC, etc. We get to look at all that code again. And 4GL results get really strange.
From my viewpoint, the price/performance benefits aren't in the computing power, but in the lack of porting and lessened training required.
In the UNIX world each of the manufacturers 'tweak' the OS in an attempt to make their product shine to the detriment of the UNIX world. It is INTCs greatest strength that they have said 'here is the processor -- make computers' to the world, and that Microsoft has, in the past, been the only OS in town.
tgptndr |
