26. Herbert Grosch

(b. 1918) has been an eminent computer scientist since the 1940s. In 1965, he put forth a claim that he “humbly” called Grosch’s Law. This law can be paraphrased as:

Computer performance increases as the square of the cost. If Computer A costs twice as much as Computer B, you should expect Computer A to be four times as fast as Computer B.

Use any of the TPC benchmarks to confirm or refute this claim. What happens when you restrict your comparison to similar systems? More specifically, check the price/performance statistics for systems running only the same class of operating system and database software. What happens when you don’t restrict the comparison to similar systems? Do these results change when you select a different benchmark, e.g., TPC-W versus TPC-C? Discuss your findings.