

Is the PC Dead? - hornokplease
http://blogs.forbes.com/rogerkay/2011/02/28/is-the-pc-dead/

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mindcrime
_However, over time both will increase in performance past the point that most
users need, and both will be able to serve in the vast majority of
circumstances._

I'm not sure sure I agree with this bit; depending, of course, on how you
define "most users." But as CPU power is steadily increasing, so to are the
size and the complexity of the problems we need to solve. So we're solving
part of this by the move back to centralization... I have a big dataset to
crunch, I crunch it on a cluster using Hadoop or MPI or what-have-you...

(Thinking out loud here) I can't help but think that the problems in the "it
makes sense to calculate locally, but not to push it to cluster" space are
also growing larger and larger, and that the problems and the performance
needed to solve them will continue to grow in lockstep fashion. So there is,
in effect, no upper limit the bound of performance needed by PCs (or
"endpoints" per the article) unless we go wholesale back to a model of doing
anything substantial on a server/cluster. So, is that really where things are
going? Or is there always going to be a middle ground for high-performance PCs
that outperform tablets, smart-phones, etc.?

