Re: How are CPU Speed and Overall CPW Related? -- MIDRANGE-L

Hi Pat,

It's the old problem of comparing apples to oranges. Is that a fair
comparison? Sure, why not? It's a comparison. Is it fair to compare apples
to pigs? Why not?

A peek inside an AS400 model 150 looks very much like the inside of my PC,
although inter-device wiring is a lot neater in the former. One CPU chip in
each, but multiple processors in both (e.g. my video card and sound card
both have processor chips -- DSP's -- on them), SCSI disks (which have their
own processors), no RAID (at least not in the 150 I looked at), similar
power supplies, etc.

And perhaps we do have different ideas of multi-processing. Win9x does task
swapping. WinNT is interrupt driven with time slices (although not
user-changeable) -- I can run mail merge and other jobs in the background
while still getting useable processing power in the foreground. And if I
look at the tasks running when I'm not doing anything, there are quite a
few. And NT is running a GUI, which OS/400 to my knowledge doesn't even
attempt. This is terrible!<G> How did I get into defending NT against
OS400?!  Anyway, WinNT and OS/2 have come a long way from DOS (or less than
DOS - I ran a business on an Altair 8080 in the 70's - a *small*
business<g>) and share some of the same concepts and hardware as OS400 and
AS400's.

I also wanted to point out that we didn't hear enough about the test
conditions on the two machines. Imo, it's perfectly reasonable to try to
compare a CPU-intensive program on a WinNT (or Linux for that matter) PC vs
OS/400, as long as we know all the test conditions. Analyzing the results
(is it CPU vs CPU or OS vs OS that caused the performance difference) is a
guessing game without knowing more.

Regards,
Peter Dow
Dow Software Services, Inc.
909 425-0194 voice
909 425-0196 fax

> > It is possible to have a single-user AS400, that is, an AS400 on which
there
> > is only one user, with no spooling going on, no other communications
going
> > on, is it not? All the things you ask should not be relevant if that was
the
> > situation.
>
> Because the OS was written from the ground up as multi-user, that's not
> really a fair comparison. The items I referred to fire up when the
> machine
> loads the OS and nothing can or will stop that. They are all elements of
> a OS that supports multi-job environment. To compare a single Intel CPU
> to a machine that has many "processors" just can't be done and that was
> my point.
>
> I have been using PC's long before they got to be a commodity based
> product.
> (Late 70's early 80's)
>
> I am well aware of what they can and "can't" do. If you have ever seen
> any NT machine with a single processor running more than one job at a
> time, you and I don't have the same concept of multi-processing. Task
> swapping is NOT multi-user. It creates the illusion of multi-user but
> it's not the same. W/xx or NT(Nice Try) remain what they are and in
> fairness to them, should not be compared to a real OS.
>
>
> > Btw, laptops do have spooling, communications for various devices
(modem,
> > ethernet, etc), can handle multiple users (Georgia Softworks has a
telnet
> > server for NT I've used), are keeping track of hardware & software
interrups
> > and doing something about them when they happen, etc. And a laptop could
run
> > 5 simultaneous occurrences of the same program. I have to ask <G> -- are
you
> > still running DOS on your laptop?
> >
> >
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