Computing power rises with the square of cost, favouring one large machine over many small ones; later hardware broke this.
Held through the mainframe era and reversed once commodity hardware arrived. Its inversion is what made clusters, and eventually cloud computing, cheaper than large single machines.
In practice
- In 1965 one large machine outperformed four smaller ones for the same money; by 1995 the reverse was decisively true.
- A team that consolidates onto one large database server today is usually paying more for less than a cluster of small ones.
- Standing
- Held in the mainframe era; reversed once commodity hardware arrived.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Technology & Software
- Essay
- The curves, the limits and the laws of software