Tom Foremski writes:
Gates’ Copernicus-like revelation that we no longer live in a PC-centric world is late but significant for Microsoft. But has MSFT’s PC partner Intel realized the world has changed?
The last time I looked, Intel was quite happily promoting its latest and greatest PC microprocessors, vowing to make them ever more powerful and complex.
But with the Big Computer approach, for most tasks, you don’t need super-smart PC clients, because the Big Computer can do the processing far faster than the client.
You just need a client that can render video/graphic/audio bits really fast and needs only a little bit of local smarts. And there are plenty of chips out there than can do this, and that don’t cost several hundred dollars, as Intel’s top of the line PC chips and chipsets.
Yes, there are many professional tasks that require a powerful PC client system, but for most of us, the Big Computer in the Cloud will do just fine once we get ubiquitous broadband–which isn’t far away.
