Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: ATTACK OF KILLER MICROS
Message-ID: <1225@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 18 Oct 89 16:55:31 GMT
References: <35825@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <127@csinc.UUCP> <33802@ames.arc.nasa.gov>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center
Lines: 31

In article <33802@ames.arc.nasa.gov>, lamaster@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Hugh LaMaster) writes:

|  I will make a reverse claim:  People who want status symbols buy PC's for their
|  office.  These PC's, the last time I checked, were only 1/1000th as cost
|  effective at doing scientific computations as supercomputers.  Talk about 
|  *waste*...  :-)

  What you say is true, but you seem to draw a strange conclusion from
it... very few people do scientific calculations on a PC. They are used
for spreadsheets, word processing, and even reading news ;-) These are
things which supercomputers do poorly. Benchmark nroff on a Cray...
EGAD! it's slower than an IBM 3081! Secondly *any* computer becomes less
cost effective as it is used less. Unless you have the workload to
heavily use a supercomputer you will find the cost gets really steep.

  Think of it this way, a technical worker cost a company about $50000 a
year (or more), counting salary and benefits. The worker works 240 days
a year (2 weeks vacation, 10 days holiday and sick), at a cost per
*working hour* of $26 more or less. For a $1600 PC to be cost effective
in just a year it must save about 16 minutes a day, which is pretty easy
to do. You also get increased productivity.

  Obviously not every PC is utilized well. Neither are workstations (how
many hours drawing fractals and playing games) or supercomputers, for
that matter. That problem is a management issue, not a factor of
computer size.
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
"The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called
'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see
that the world is flat!" - anon