Putting what amounts to a supercomputer into everyone's home will mean dramatic increases in software power and utility. Things that today can be done effectively only by clusters of computers running in data centers will be done by average home computers, appliances, and electronic entertainment devices...
The Promise of Personal Supercomputers
"Intel thinks that recognition, mining, and synthesis (RMS) applications will be key. These technologies could allow for real-time language translation via cell phones, real-time video search by spoken phrase or image, and better recommendation systems for shopping, meal planning, and even health care."
2 comments:
I wonder what direction will this go -- will everyone have a number of powerful computers, embeded in different devices? Or will it become common for there to be a singe "household" super computer, and many weaker devices networked to in? We could see laptop or tablet PCs for each family member that are basically internet devices networked to a single home computer.
That is a very good question. My current best guess is that over the next 10 years this technology will be spread across multiple devices. We'll have desktop computers, we'll have entertainment machines that are hybrid computers/DVR's/steroes/DVD/etc.
And there will be smaller devices that communicate with the larger machines. And these will all be linked via wifi and/or mesh networks. Possibly all this could be linked into a single distributed "home grid computer" as well. Many more tech-savy households are pretty much allready at this level but the trend will strengthen and become more mainstream over the next decade.
The desktop computer and/or central enterainment system will have most of the computing horsepower and that is where the "supercomputer style" software will reside.
A home will contain a "cloud" of computing which people access with various different devices - mice/keyboard for traditional computing, remote controls and voice for entertainment devices, remotes and voice for home automation, etc.
Of course, eventually even something the size of a palmtop or remote control will have the equivalent computer power of today's supercomputer. So, long term(15+ years?) we get the computer power receding into the background - possibly largely invisible aside from a few small devices for input/control. The average home of 2025 might look rather retro to our eyes - with all the computing power largely invisible, the wall-screen invisible when not in use, robots tucked away in closets, etc.
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