Grosch's law re-revisited: CPU power and the cost of computation

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Grosch's law re-revisited: CPU power and the cost of computation

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Communications of the ACM archive
Volume 28 , Issue 2 (February 1985) table of contents

Pages: 142 - 151

Year of Publication: 1985

ISSN:0001-0782

Author

Phillip Ein-Dor

Tel-Aviv Univ., Tel-Aviv, Israel

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 9, Downloads (12 Months): 48, Citation Count: 22

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ABSTRACT

Does Grosch's law, which postulated that the costs of computer systems increase at a rate equivalent to the square root of their power, still hold? The age of mini-, micro-, and supercomputers seems to have complicated the situation. When computers are grouped according to their size and power, Grosch's law seems to hold within each group, but not between different groups.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

	1	E. G. Cale , L. L. Gremillion , J. L. McKenney, Price/performance patterns of U. S. computer systems, Communications of the ACM, v.22 n.4, p.225-233, April 1979 [doi>10.1145/359094.359097]
	2	Grosch. H.A. Hieh weed arithmetic: The digital cornouter as a research iool. I. 0;f. &c. Am. 43,4 (Apr. 1953; '
	3	Grosch, H.A. Grosch's law revisited. Computenoorld 8, 16 (Apr. 16, 1975), 24.
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	7	Martin B. Solomon, Jr., Economies of scale and the IBM system/360, Communications of the ACM, v.9 n.6, p.435-440, June 1966 [doi>10.1145/365696.365715]

CITED BY 22

	Gerald V. Post, How often should a firm buy new PCs?, Communications of the ACM, v.42 n.5, p.17-21, May 1999
	Brian D. Lynch , H. Raghav Rao , Winston T. Lin, Economic analysis of microcomputer hardware, Communications of the ACM, v.33 n.10, p.119-129, Oct. 1990
	Haim Mendelson, Economies of scale in computing: Grosch's law revisited, Communications of the ACM, v.30 n.12, p.1066-1072, Dec. 1987
	Y. M. Kang, Computer hardware performance: production and cost function analyses, Communications of the ACM, v.32 n.5, p.586-593, May 1989
	H. Raghav Rao , Brian D. Lynch, Hedonic price analysis of workstation attributes, Communications of the ACM, v.36 n.12, p.95-102, Dec. 1993
	D. M. Dias , B. R. Iyer , P. S. Yu, On coupling many small systems for transaction processing, ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, v.14 n.2, p.104-110, June 1986
	Jon Bentley, ACM forum, Communications of the ACM, v.28 n.7, p.668-670, July 1985
	Leonard Kleinrock, Distributed systems, Communications of the ACM, v.28 n.11, p.1200-1213, Nov. 1985
	V. A. F. Almeida , I. M. M. Vasconcelos , J. N. C. Árabe , D. A. Menascé, Using random task graphs to investigate the potential benefits of heterogeneity in parallel systems, Proceedings of the 1992 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing, p.683-691, November 16-20, 1992, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
	Diane Crawford, Technical correspondence, Communications of the ACM, v.34 n.12, p.109-117, Dec. 1991
	Sandeep Purao , Hemant K. Jain , Derek L. Nazareth, ODE: a tool for distributing object-oriented applications, Information and Management, v.39 n.8, p.689-703, September 2002
	Young Moo Kang , Robert B. Miller , Roger Alan Pick, Comments on "Grosch's law re-revisited: CPU power and the cost of computation", Communications of the ACM, v.29 n.8, p.779-781, Aug. 1986
	Daniel Menascé , Virgílio Almeida, Cost-performance analysis of heterogeneity in supercomputer architectures, Proceedings of the 1990 conference on Supercomputing, p.169-177, October 1990, New York, New York, United States
	Corey D. Schou, An argument for local area networks (extended abstract): a case of economics, Proceedings of the 1985 ACM annual conference on The range of computing : mid-80's perspective: mid-80's perspective, p.306-308, October 1985, Denver, Colorado, United States
	Robert L. Ashenhurst, ACM forum, Communications of the ACM, v.31 n.6, p.630-637, June 1988
	Danilo Ardagna , Chiara Francalanci , Marco Trubian, A cost-oriented approach for infrastructural design, Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Applied computing, March 14-17, 2004, Nicosia, Cyprus
	D. M. Dias , B. R. Iyer , P. S. Yu, Tradeoffs Between Coupling Small and Large Processors for Transaction Processing, IEEE Transactions on Computers, v.37 n.3, p.310-320, March 1988
	Phillip Ein-Dor , Jacob Feldmesser, Attributes of the performance of central processing units: a relative performance prediction model, Communications of the ACM, v.30 n.4, p.308-317, April 1987
	Danilo Ardagna , Chiara Francalanci, Joint optimization of hardware and network systems, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, v.66 n.3, p.469-485, March 2006
	Richard E. Smith, A Historical Overview of Computer Architecture, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, v.10 n.4, p.277-303, October 1988
	Sandeep Purao , Hemant K. Jain , Derek L. Nazareth, An Approach to Distribution of Object-Oriented Applications in Loosely Coupled Networks, Journal of Management Information Systems, v.18 n.3, p.195-234, Number 3/Winter 2001/02
	Lawrence A. West, Jr., Researching the costs of information systems, Journal of Management Information Systems, v.11 n.2, p.75-107, September 1994

INDEX TERMS

Classification:
C. Computer Systems Organization

K. Computing Milieux
K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
K.6.2 Installation Management
Subjects: Pricing and resource allocation

General Terms:
Economics, Measurement, Performance

REVIEW

"Thomas C. Richards : Reviewer"

This paper examines the validity of Grosch's law [1] and then goes on to examine three important studies related to evaluating the performance of computers. These include one undertaken by Knight in the early 1960s [2,3]; a second major study by more...

Collaborative Colleagues:

Phillip Ein-Dor: colleagues

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