RE: Trivia: Processor MHz

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Steve Richter
>
> So the fastest iSeries has a slower chip than the standard Mac.
>
> This is not trivial.  The slow cpu of the iSeries prevents modern
> programming languages from being used on our system.

I think this is what some of the other posters may have been referring to
when they stated that MHz alone as a measuring stick is meaningless.  While
it's not meaningless, MHz alone is not a sufficient guide.  While a 252MHz
CPU may be underpowered for some applications, particularly the more
inefficient Windows applications, it is more than powerful enough for what
the iSeries does, namely business transaction processing.

This is for two reasons: iSeries applications do far more database access on
much larger databases than most desktop applications, and iSeries machines
have many independent processors that offload the majority of the peripheral
processing that is relegated to the primary CPU on desktops.  Try to run an
application that needs to sort a hundred million customer records on a 1GHz
Windows machine as opposed to a lowly 252MHz iSeries, and you'll see what I
mean.

So back to your point about "modern programming languages".  What do you
consider modern?  Java?  In many cases, this is due to the fact that people
insist on using JDBC in their Java applications, which is fundamentally much
slower than native database access.  It makes little difference on a Windows
machine, because there are no peripheral subprocessors in the first place
and the database already performs poorly, but when you add the overhead of
JDBC to the overhead of SQL on an iSeries, you are definitely going to have
performance issues.

A well written RPG application still processes database transactions faster
than any Windows machine.  So I question what you mean my "modern
programming language" and instead I'd ask you to define a specific
application where the iSeries box does not measure up to a Windows machine.
My guess is that not one database-intensive application will appear in your
list, which simply bolsters my contention that we need to focus on the
iSeries as a database transaction server, and leave the CPU intensive stuff,
particularly graphics, to the gigahertz desktop machines.

Joe