On Sat, 12 Jul 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Then I see this: > http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/hardware/workstations/ > > > RS/6000 43P Model 150 > from $8,805.00 IBM Web price* > Monitor not included > Power, performance and expandability to fit your budget. > · Choice of 250 or 375MHz PowerPC 604e > processors > · Starting with 128MB and growing to 1GB of > memory > · Ultra2 SCSI disk support/SSA RAID disk support > · Supports GXT135P and GXT4500P graphics
Hmm... That's about the same price as 4-5 years ago ;-) > Now, 250 Mhz isn't a lot more than 200 Mhz. Sure its disk is faster, and > its a more-nicely specced machine, but it still has basically the same > CPU as is in my six-year-old Powermac. about the same age as my Pentium > II-233 system. > > What's special about this IBM kit to justify its price? I remember asking a similar questions a few years ago... At that time the price of the system (minus the CPU) was reasonable, while the (slowest variant of the) CPU costed ca. $3000, which was 4 times as much as my LongTrail with 200 MHz 604e. It turned out the IBM `CPU' was not a plain CPU, but the whole CPU board, with a fast 128 (or 256?) bit interface to memory and (IIRC) room for extra CPUs. Note that IBM had already stopped production of 604e's at that time... Gr{oetje,eeting}s, Geert -- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds