MULTIDIMENSIONAL-SCALING - AN ANALYSIS OF 1980-1990 COMPUTERS

Computer performance is an important issue for engineering and economi c aspects of computer usage, planning, design and research. The Co-plo t methodology graphically relates attributes, observations and interre lations between attributes, thus enabling the simultaneous study of al l the observations and variables of a given data set. An analysis of p erformance attributes of computers from the 1980's (1981-1991) was car ried out according to the Co-plot methodology. The analysis shows that during this decade, computer performance became more dependent on IO rate, cache size and multiprocessing and less dependent on memory-size and IO addressing capabilities. At the same time, the high correlatio n between CP; speed and performance was maintained.