I was debating something after reading the points on this slide -- we want to compute less, and we want more specialized computation. Why not outsource the majority of our computation to web-servers with specialized hardware? We would get all the benefits of specialized computation, without the expensive space and ASIC cost!
Except not. Remember how accessing memory is super expensive? Well transmitting information to a cell tower (and receiving a result later) is wayyyyy more expensive, especially in terms of power consumption. So this outsourcing is really only beneficial if the amount of computation required vastly dwarfs the dataset that needs to be transmitted from a mobile device.
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yanzhan2
@smklein, that's an interesting point. I believe if the network bandwidth is high and latency is low, then maybe our PC/Mac would be only a screen, some basic OS control and network stuff. Also, the game Titanfall use Microsoft cloud computing to do some non-player activity to let the local computers on players to focus on graphical performance. I think this is one big trend.
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jinghuan
How do hardwares such as FPGAs and ASICs save energy and allow good performance at the same time?
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dfarrow
@jinghuan - Fixed-function hardware sacrifices generality to achieve faster execution per available resource. What a general-purpose CPU can achieve with a given budget (transistors, power, etc) will be much lower than what an ASIC with the same budget would be able to achieve because the ASIC does one task only. This is how ASICs save energy while having high performance; they exchange the general-purpose circuity of a modern CPU for a fixed-function circuit which only does one specific task. As I understand it, FPGAs also have very good performance but aren't quite as fast as ASICs. FPGAs can be repeatedly burned with arbitrary logic, but the resulting circuitry will be slower than the "pure" transistor-level logic that makes up an ASIC.
@smklein - Neat idea, reminds me of how the Opera Mini browser handled javascript. They proxied your traffic through their servers to do some of the heavy-lifting server-side, and sent back to your device a static version of the page.
I was debating something after reading the points on this slide -- we want to compute less, and we want more specialized computation. Why not outsource the majority of our computation to web-servers with specialized hardware? We would get all the benefits of specialized computation, without the expensive space and ASIC cost!
Except not. Remember how accessing memory is super expensive? Well transmitting information to a cell tower (and receiving a result later) is wayyyyy more expensive, especially in terms of power consumption. So this outsourcing is really only beneficial if the amount of computation required vastly dwarfs the dataset that needs to be transmitted from a mobile device.
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
@smklein, that's an interesting point. I believe if the network bandwidth is high and latency is low, then maybe our PC/Mac would be only a screen, some basic OS control and network stuff. Also, the game Titanfall use Microsoft cloud computing to do some non-player activity to let the local computers on players to focus on graphical performance. I think this is one big trend.
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
How do hardwares such as FPGAs and ASICs save energy and allow good performance at the same time?
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
@jinghuan - Fixed-function hardware sacrifices generality to achieve faster execution per available resource. What a general-purpose CPU can achieve with a given budget (transistors, power, etc) will be much lower than what an ASIC with the same budget would be able to achieve because the ASIC does one task only. This is how ASICs save energy while having high performance; they exchange the general-purpose circuity of a modern CPU for a fixed-function circuit which only does one specific task. As I understand it, FPGAs also have very good performance but aren't quite as fast as ASICs. FPGAs can be repeatedly burned with arbitrary logic, but the resulting circuitry will be slower than the "pure" transistor-level logic that makes up an ASIC.
@smklein - Neat idea, reminds me of how the Opera Mini browser handled javascript. They proxied your traffic through their servers to do some of the heavy-lifting server-side, and sent back to your device a static version of the page.
This comment was marked helpful 1 times.