Edit: Still thought provoking.
Originally posted September 11, 2012 on AIXchange
I recently attended another IBM technical briefing. As always, it was time well spent. This briefing included a keynote from IBMer Brad McCredie, whose ideas really resonated with me. Basically, Brad said the golden age of computing may already be behind us. No longer can increasing clock speeds and raw performance improvements dominate our computing hardware purchasing decisions.
Brad used the analogy of buying a new car. In his example, the model’s horsepower and track times hadn’t changed in 30 years. There were no performance improvements whatsoever. Still, there was progress. The new models had better brakes, better seatbelts, a more comfortable interior and significantly higher gas mileage. There was built-in navigation, a better sound system and even lighted cup holders. In short, while performance hadn’t advanced, the overall car driving experience has been transformed. Now it’s the efficiency and creature comforts — not the performance — that catches our eye.
Something similar could be said about the airline industry. Brad took us from the Wright brothers to the Concorde. He noted that planes don’t fly any faster now than they did a generation ago. And yet, Boeing 787s are sold out through the end of the decade. The new planes promise greater fuel efficiency and usability.
Brad then moved onto televisions. With flat-screen prices coming way down, manufacturers no longer emphasize bigger. Instead, they develop features like 3D TV, Internet-ready capabilities and amazing built-in sound systems.
This is now happening in computers as well. We often look at factors beyond raw performance. We want to improve our TCO. We need to manage unplanned outages. We need to run our workloads on fewer cores. We need efficiency.
Obviously, some industries still emphasize raw computing performance. He pointed to the financial industry, where every little bit of speed can help make money. Most customers, however, want to save on power and cooling costs. Or maybe their needs center on RAS and virtualization management features, or the capability to rapidly provision servers or consolidate storage and network infrastructure rather than manage two different networks. We don’t strictly focus on speeds and feeds and raw performance.
So what goes into your computing purchasing decisions these days?