| kitler53 said: you forgot to multiply all of xbone's stats by 3x for teh cloud. |
The reality is we don't know what the possible impact off-system computing will have.
"The Cloud" is nothing more than Client/Server computing in some respects. To assume there isn't potential in that is to be ignorant of reality. After the PC was released, businesses started creating client/server applications where PCs were used essentially for UI and mainframes and UNIX servers did all the heavy processing. Eventually, with the advent of the web, you had lightweight applications that ran on the client that accessed the Web server, which did all the heavy processing.
Heck, multiplayer games are nothing more than client/server computing. The only difference is that the rendering takes place on the local client. Regardless of whether it's a peer-to-peer or server-to-peer arrangement, one system does all the leg work in determining where everyone in the game is and how they're all meshing together.
People, like yourself, may like to playdown the impact off-system computing will have in the cloud, but the reality is it can be extremely powerful. We are beginning to run into a wall in terms of computing. They've developed single atom circuits. They can't get any smaller than single atoms. Unless computing moves away from Silicon, then what will eventually happen is we will hit a wall. Device won't get smaller, computing power won't grow exponentially every few years, and the only way to get more power into a machine is you either build a bigger box or you offload computational work.
Quantum computing is still decades away. Other mediums that allow better cooling properies than silicon and would allow smaller dies are still being developed. Even still, they won't be able to offer a circuit size smaller than the atomic level, they'll only allow engineers to develop dies with less space between circuits and still run cool. Not to mention operate without shorting out.
So yeah. If for cost reasons you can't increase the size of your device, then in order to expand the capabilities of what it can do you will need to offload some of the computation onto servers. For consumers, that's the cloud. Businesses have the option of in-house servers as well as cloud-based servers.
