Sadly it looks like PPK was in too much of a hurry to post some 'quick thoughts'. A little bit of additional reading (heck, even watching the video on the Silk blog) would have revealed that Silk's "split architecture" is much, much smarter than simply having the server send a bitmap of the page to the browser.
From the introductory blog post [1]:
> All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely.
Then there's the Ars article [2] that explains some of what Silk's split architecture can do:
> Amazon will load the webpage on the server side, downloading all of the necessary content elements in parallel. After downloading the content, Amazon will send the compiled page—including HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and images—back to the device as a single stream of data… The Silk browser maintains a single persistent connection to Amazon's cloud (using Google's fast SPDY protocol), through which requests are sent and content is received… An Amazon engineer at the New York launch event told us that the split browsing infrastructure can even compile JavaScript to ARM machine code on the server side in situations where it will provide a speed boost.
And the Terms & Conditions [3] make it clear that Silk can stand on its own two feet if desired:
> You can also choose to operate Amazon Silk in basic or “off-cloud” mode. Off-cloud mode allows web pages generally to go directly to your computer rather than pass through our servers. As such, it does not take advantage of Amazon’s cloud computing services to speed-up web content delivery.
When they say "split architecture", it sounds like they really mean it.
From the introductory blog post [1]:
> All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely.
Then there's the Ars article [2] that explains some of what Silk's split architecture can do:
> Amazon will load the webpage on the server side, downloading all of the necessary content elements in parallel. After downloading the content, Amazon will send the compiled page—including HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and images—back to the device as a single stream of data… The Silk browser maintains a single persistent connection to Amazon's cloud (using Google's fast SPDY protocol), through which requests are sent and content is received… An Amazon engineer at the New York launch event told us that the split browsing infrastructure can even compile JavaScript to ARM machine code on the server side in situations where it will provide a speed boost.
And the Terms & Conditions [3] make it clear that Silk can stand on its own two feet if desired:
> You can also choose to operate Amazon Silk in basic or “off-cloud” mode. Off-cloud mode allows web pages generally to go directly to your computer rather than pass through our servers. As such, it does not take advantage of Amazon’s cloud computing services to speed-up web content delivery.
When they say "split architecture", it sounds like they really mean it.
[1]: http://amazonsilk.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/introducing-amazo...
[2]: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/09/amazons-silk-web...
[3]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...