ARM already dominates the consumer space, if you subtract PC and console gaming. Once the consoles go ARM, that will flip the market in terms of non-professional non-business related CPU cycles.
If you had to place a bet on which will dominate the consumer market in, say, 10 years, what would you say?
People have been trying to make FPGAs easier to program for decades with little to show for it. Very very low confidence that's going to change.
You don't need the bandwidth to stream video, that's mostly a latency insensitive market and the bandwidth to do it has been there for years. But that doesn't do a damn thing for interactive use.
Even doing interactive use over local networking has obvious degradation and once you add in geographic differences and switches/routers, it only gets worse. Hell, people notice a difference between game servers with 50ms and 80ms pings.
As far as the rational to sell 100Mbps or 1Gbps or 10Gbps, people aren't buying those connections for the constant data rate, they are buying them for the burst data rate. Less waiting to DL 50+GB is a significant driver.
I know a lot of people with 1Gbps connections, and they wouldn't go back to something slower if you paid them. Hell I know 1 guy who basically keeps his Steam library in a ramdisk because he can just delete and redownload games so fast it doesn't matter how much storage he has for it. He's going to be upgrading to a 10Gbps within the next month, fyi.
If you had to place a bet on which will dominate the consumer market in, say, 10 years, what would you say?
I guess it's tied with Windows closely, and what will the fate of windows be.
I know it's all wild speculation, and I am a noob when it comes to all of this, but I am curios as to how will the computer, software and SOC landscape look like in the future.
Are there any relevant trends to look at to try and predict?
Will we all be rocking iphones and android phones with amazing performance that have continuum-like capabilities? Or will windows remain on x86 and people would still be buying laptops?
Yes, but beyond that area you mention (mobile) how would they attack?
I think they would probably go for the corporate data center first (ie, VDI). Then scale back some lesser core count non-mobile SoCs for the consumer space.
They could also scale up to non-mobile consumer from NAS first (bypassing corporate data center), but die sizes being what they are I am thinkng this probably makes less sense.
The incentive was not as strong, for a long time it was not necessary as you would get a decent performance boost from the CPU itself, then from going to multiple cores.
These 2 trends have reached their limits, so there has to be new solutions, even if it is painful.
You can also stay still and see the prices slowly erode, which is a very possible scenario as well, but people are not going to continue to pay for new HW for 5-10% increases in performance.
It is a bit of a chicken and egg problem (as many problems are), you need better latency to enable new use cases, but new use cases won't appear until you get the latency.
Who can solve the issue? the obvious name is Google, they are already running an ISP service and would benefit from this could based model.
How often do people DL a 50GB file nowadays?
and even when they do, how often do they need it in 30 seconds rather than 5 minutes?
My point is that yes, latency is not quite there yet for the masses, but I don't think it's more than 5 years away, certainly not 10, and as you say it's already here for some people.
Yep, so the ARM Server running the x86 emulation needs to be inherently better in terms of performance per watt (with acceptable single thread). This, in order to counteract the loss in efficiency from the translation.
Um, no, just no. People have been working on making FPGAs easier for A LONG TIME. The advantage of FPGAs for things they work for have in the past, do now, and will in the future far outstrip any performance improvement in CPUs. The problem is that FPGAs have been, are, and will continue to be very difficult to work with for non-hardware people. And even the vast majority of hardware people.
That is a big IF.No it is not chicken and egg. It is physics. If the latency issue exists on local lan, it will exist period. Unless you can change physics, the latency issues will always be there. There isn't some magic programming that will make it better.
Not even commenting this one, this is just ridiculous... Once is not enough, there is something called a tradeoff, I've heard engineers do it all the time!How often? Once is enough. When you want it, you want it now. And they want it instantaneously or as close to that as possible.
I've never said latency changes with bandwidth, I've said that the focus should change from improving the bandwidth to improving latency to a level where these solutions are working flawlessly.The latency doesn't really change with faster bandwidths. The latency is from a combination of speed of light and switching delays. And it is pretty much fixed.