Pc Vs Mainframes

Comparing and Contrasting

Personal Computers and Mainframes

This paper will provide a comparison and contrast between Personal Computers (PC’s) and mainframes. It will discuss what a mainframe and a PC is and how they were established.

The first difference that most computer users think of is size, when they hear the word mainframe. They are not the enormous, room-sized metal boxes or frames they once were. Today’s mainframes can easily be the size of a desktop PC. A PC, desktop or workstation is approximately 18 " square and 8" wide.

A mainframe is a high-level computer designed for intensive computational tasks it is usually used by large corporations or organizations. They are shared by multiple users that are connected to the computer through terminals. Mainframes have a long uptime and run multi-user operating systems and are accessed through terminals.

A PC is either a personal computer or office computer that may be connected to a local or wireless area network. The PC is usually only operated by the one person, hence the name personal computer. It is a rrelatively inexpensive computer that ranges in price from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars. A PC has a micro processor that enables the manufacturer of the computer to put a central processing unit on the hard drive of the computer.

Mainframes have a reliable single-thread performance, which is the reason for operations against a database. It is a batch processing or time-sharing models which allows large expensive systems to be used by many people, usually at the same time, or large data processing systems. They have maximum I/O connectivity and maximum I/O bandwidth, which allows connections between drives and processors from having any bottle necks. Reliability is a key advantage to mainframes as they allow for simple degradation and service while the system is being utilized. Mainframes will continue to thrive because they are continually evolving as a general purpose computing platform and continues to increase with numerous product lines.

You can buy a PC at most computer stores for less than $1500 and have a relatively powerful machine. In contrast, mainframes are very expensive, and you would not be able to open one up and simply add new components. They are usually installed in temperature-controlled rooms with access being limited to authorized personnel. Maintenance is usually carried out by some one who is trained in maintaining such a system.

A typical PC will have one processor or possible a dual processor with the newer versions running at about 2.6 GHz, a hard drive with 80 Gigabytes of disk space, and 256 to 512 MB of RAM.

Mainframes on the other hand, can come with hundreds of hard drives in a sophisticated RAID array with 30+ Terabytes of storage capacity and typically mainframes will have multiple processors and gigabytes of memory.

Most PCs will run a Windows operating system and function