The writer makes assumptions that strike me as completely arbitrary in this article and I feel the need to comment.<p>The writer quotes a "law" which states that in order for a computer system to be balanced the hertz of the CPU, the bytes of RAM, and the bps of IO should be the same. I shrugged it off to an old quote taking in assumptions of the time in which it was penned. I continued to read, expecting that he was illustrating a point. Then I see:<p>"So using GigE as our interconnect, a perfectly balanced system would have 1 GHz CPUs, and 1 GB of RAM for each core."<p>How can one assume that the clock of the CPU has anything at all to do with the amount of ram or network IO for a "balanced" configuration? Is it 32b or 64b processor? How wide and fast is the front side bus? Does it use a minimal instruction set or a full featured IA style set. How long is the pipeline? In effect, how much work does it do per unit time? Is this not the real question?<p>Also, how much data can you store and read from RAM per unit time? This information seems at least equally as important for an evaluation of balance as the total amount of RAM available. And finally, what is the workload? Will the parameters of the computing workload not completely determine the optimal "balance" of hardware capabilities?<p>I am commenting here as a reality check on my own thoughts about this article. Am I missing something or is this guy totally off the mark with this "law" and computing balance equation?