Figure 1.24 gives a comparison of power and performance for several benchmarks comparing two servers: Sun Fire T2000 (which uses Niagara) and IBM x346 (using Intel Xeon processors).
a. Calculate the performance/power ratio for each processor on each benchmark.
b. If power is your main concern, which would you choose?
c. For the database benchmarks, the cheaper the system, the lower cost per database operation the system is. This is counterintuitive: larger systems have more throughput, so one might think that buying a larger system would be a larger absolute cost, but lower per operation cost. Since this is true, why do any larger server farms buy expensive servers? (Look at exercise 1.4 for some reasons.)