<b>Power-efficient chips for mobile devices will move into desktops, laptops,...

Terrence Miao - 2012-11-10 21:53:50+1100 - Updated: 2012-11-10 21:54:03+1100

Power-efficient chips for mobile devices will move into desktops, laptops, and servers

• Moore’s Law Is Becoming Irrelevant.
• PC is really just a smartphone in another form factor. TVs are big smartphones.
• It's rubbish that ARM-based chips can’t be powerful enough to support everything PCs need to do. For example: image editing and processing.

ARM CEO Warren East Says Mobile Chips Will Move into Energy-Efficient Desktops, Laptops, and Servers. | MIT Technology Review

Terrence Miao - 2012-11-10 22:08:43+1100 - Updated: 2012-11-10 23:45:58+1100

+Dean Budd +Kieran Simpson I used believe it's totally waste your precious money spending $49 on a "powerless" Raspberry Pi dud. But after reading this article, I reckon both you are "Forward Thinking, Broadly Looking" awesome dudes!

Kieran Simpson - 2012-11-11 00:52:04+1100

+Dean Budd <blush>I think you're Broadly Looking too</blush> hahahahahahaha

Kieran Simpson - 2012-11-11 00:57:13+1100

+Terrence Miao there was a G+ post a while back about some dude(s) that had built a supercomputer out of Pis due to their work being able to be parallised using message passing (ie: over a network). Thus their low wattage farm was able to grok the work with significant power savings.

IMHO Google led the way by showing that lots of small low cost, low power commodity products is better than going for the Big Iron hardware smash.

Michael Poloni - 2012-11-11 07:41:41+1100

This would be behind Ubuntu's idea to build an OS that will power all your desktop peripherals from your phone. It could run simply as a virtual machine, or "app" in of itself!

For now, I think it depends on the use case. How are people using the computer? What are they doing with it? A big box might still be needed for some time to come for those who need major processing grunt (maybe they're scientific researchers, or maybe they're editing movies). However I'd like to see that sort of high-end use pushed to the data center on big servers, where efficiencies (both performance and running costs) can be contained. That sort of change requires good network infrastructure. Cue NBN anyone?