PC's vs. Mainframes
This paper will give a detailed comparison and contrast between Personal Computers (PC's) and mainframes. The first obvious difference between a PC and a mainframe is their size. A PC is about 18" square and maybe 8" wide. Most people could take one apart with little or no training and install a new component like a modem or sound card. You can buy a PC at most computer stores for less than $1500 and have a relatively powerful machine. In contrast, mainframes are very large and very expensive, and you would not be able to open one up and simply add new components. They are usually installed in temperature-controlled rooms with access being limited to authorized personnel. Maintenance is usually carried out by a third-party under strict contracts. A typical PC will have one processor running at about 2.6 GHz, a hard drive with 80 Gigabytes of disk space, and 256 to 512 MB of RAM. Mainframes on the other hand, can come with hundreds of hard drives in a sophisticated RAID array with 30+ Terabytes of storage capacity and typically mainframes will have multiple processors and gigabytes of memory. Most PCs will run a Windows operating system and function as clients in a network environment while mainframes exist on
The differences lie mainly in reliability and I/O capabilities. In recent years, mainframes have become cheaper to operate than large farms of networked PCs. Mainframe's have a lot of redundancy and serviceability features built in. This has allowed companies who build mainframes time to perfect their systems and create a very formidable machine which has become virtually bulletproof. Down time is an important factor because it can be very costly to companies not to mention the possible loss or corruption of data. Compared to a PC, mainframes may have up to three times the bus speed, 10 times the cache speed, perhaps 32 or 64 overlapped data transfers. These platforms have included Personal Computers and workstations running Microsoft Windows, Microsoft NT, Novell NetWare and a wide variety of UNIX based systems. For example, Hitachi's Skylines have 16 ports into main memory and 32 ports into cache memory, and that cache memory is 10 times faster than regular, main memory. The computing model shifted from mainframe centric to network centric. Diagnosing failures is not the only complex issue. Half of the hardware in a mainframe is used for error detection and correction. Retrieved March 29, 2004 from: http://www.
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