Re: I need new glasses..
@AC
"The niche Solaris / AX / HP-UX and all other Unix has, is large scale-up systems. Fact is that x86 does not scale well. Only recently the first 16-socket x86 servers has arrived to the market. Meanwhile we had 64-sockets Unix RISC servers for a long time."
I don't disagree with much of what you say, but 16 socket x86 has been around for ages. IBM (when they made servers) produced them (from memory) 10 years ago at least. However, I do agree with your principle, as x86 generally doesn't have the interconnects required for effective scaling.
"There are numerous stories of companies migrating from Mainframes to x86 and saving loads of money and increasing performance many times, as Mainframes have much slower cpus than x86."
This isn't true. Mainframes have higher clock speeds than x86, but more importantly, they do more per clock tick than x86. When I was working on mainframe (some years ago now), I saw so many applications migrated onto x86 that then performed like a dog. The straight line performance of a x86 thread is nowhere near that of a mainframe thread.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
