7 ms·
With phones doubling performance every 1-2 years, and desktops/laptops largely stagnating, it looks like in a few years, a server rack will fit into your smartp
by sheeshkebab 8y ago
With phones doubling performance every 1-2 years, and desktops/laptops largely stagnating, it looks like in a few years, a server rack will fit into your smartphone.
And most enterprise software (and almost no individual user) barely needs more than a rack of current gen servers.
So yeah, decentralization will be upon us soon enough.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- skybrian 8y agoThis seems implausible. Moore's law is over and phones are limited by size and power. There's no reason to believe progress will continue until a phone is the same speed as a typical desktop machine, let alone a server rack.
- adventured 8y agoInterestingly it's the centralized network that will grow radically more powerful, while the home devices continue to stagnate. The total capacity of infrastructure entities like AWS will increase by 10x at a minimum over the next decade. By comparison, your phone or laptop will modestly nudge forward. Consumers are not going to buy 10x the number of laptops, desktops and smartphones that they do today, ten years out. Most likely, those figures will barely move (the smartphone industry is already stagnating). Most of the incremental spending and investment will go into the centralized infrastructure by the giants. Network speeds will continue to increase relatively rapidly. We can easily go from routine 50-100mbps home lines to 1gbps over the next decade. We're not going to see a 10x increase in the power of the average laptop (lucky if it doubles in ten years). It's primarily going to be useful for streaming/consuming very large amounts of data from epic scale central systems for gaming, 4K+, VR, etc. Decentralized systems owned by consumers will be far too weak to fill that role. The AI future isn't going to be decentralized. The very expensive infrastructure that will demand, and its need to run 24/7, will be centralized and owned by extraordinarily large corporations. It's precisely the typical consumer's home hardware that will act as the ultimate bottleneck guaranteeing decentralized can never take off. This has always been obvious, it won't prevent the fantasy from maintaining its allure of course. That will perpetually draw headlines and hype in tech, for decades to come, with no mass adoption breakthrough.
- skybrian 8y agoThat sounds very plausible to me, but I still think decentralized server-side infrastructure has some potential. Sandstorm didn't take off and maybe Mastodon isn't it, either, but it seems like someone's going to have consumer-friendly, <$10/year, general-purpose server accounts for running apps. Maybe some game will make it popular?
- dboreham 8y agoTrue but you don't need much of a server to run many of the "server side" things a single user needs.
- eswat 8y agoUntil we find ways to add more bloat to the user requirements that will require a server-of-the-future to be more than a server-of-the-present.
- imtringued 8y agoEspecially if you consider how much of a lead apple had over ARM and the custom designs of SoC vendors like qualcom then you will realize that the easy growth is already gone. 2 years for a 50% increase in performance just to catch up with the strongest competitor is very far away from doubling performance every year.
- eswat 8y agoTrue. Companies are hitting a lot of friction getting node sizes down to 7nm when compared to sizes from years or decades ago.
- buboard 8y agonetwork performance + battery consumption make phones an impossible choice for distributed web. The decline of the PC is a bad thing for the distributed web. It's the only box that can stay online with a stable connection 24/7. I believe we re not going to see distributed services like good old torrents or kazaa until PCs (or at least home routers with a lot of storage) start dominating again
- gsich 8y agoI wouldn't say it's a "decline". Most people just don't need an upgrade. You can use a PC from ~7 years ago for most stuff today. Gamers are not the majority here. The best performance boost you get from an older machine is a SSD.
- aesthesia 8y agoDesktop sales were already declining 7 years ago. A lot of people just don't care to have a desktop PC any more, and when their old computers finally break or stop working, will replace them with laptops or tablets, which can't do the sorts of always-on distributed things that we might hope.