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To: rudedog who wrote (68568)	11/15/1998 1:21:00 PM
From: jim kelley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Dog, You missed my point on the issue of the profitability of the low end PC's. The profitability is not simply determined by the cost of materials and labor it is determined by the operational costs as well. CPQ has high operating costs relative to DELL. I am sure that you can set up a situation in which multiple NIC's at gigabit transfer rates saturate the one or more elements of a servers design. I used to saturate Sun servers until UNIX rolled over and died. I know how to do this type of thing well. The solution to this problem does not lie in the I/O design by itself. The solution is to have an overall architecture for high end servers which addresses the I/O, memory hierarchy, processor interfaces and the raft of backwards compatibility issues. The notion that a single gigabit interface can saturate a 4 way server indicates lack of balanced architecture. To get more definitive we would have to specify the sustained and burst I/O requirements for each type of I/O interface. This is not something that CPQ can do by itself in the PC arena. It requires an standards based design and not a proprietary design. All these companies should be cooperating in making this happen. Patch work solutions can be made by using NIC with more intelligence and buffering. Patch work solutions can be made by designing special bus interface support chips. But this is not the way to arrive at a balanced architecture. This approach leads to "urban sprawl" and "bastard" architectures. Regards, Jim Kelley