>
Are we ready for the post-PC era?
Representatives of AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Polycom, EMC, and Azure Captial Partners discussed the topic in a breakfast round-table called “Hardware Beyond the PC,” at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference over the weekend.
Most agreed with a statement from Jen-Hsun Huang, cofounder and CEO of Nvidia, that we were now going through unprecedented times in the industry.
Huang said that people have been talking about a post-PC era for at least 15 years, but it hasn’t really changed the industry: Though the Web runs on all sorts of devices, it has run best on a PC
He did make a distinction among devices used to create content and those used to enjoy content, and said that the latter market, which mostly includes devices based on the ARM architecture, were the fastest growing part of the computing market. In that world, said Huang, backward compatibility wasn’t important. Even though Nvidia makes 99 percent of its revenue from the PC, it now recognizes we are entering the post-PC era.
Ahmed Mahmoud, Senior Vice President and CIO of AMD, believes that the big change was when companies integrated the CPU and the GPU together, thus placing an increasing emphasis on graphics. But he said compatibility was very important.
Mike Kwatinetz of Azure Capital Partners remarked that every trend lasts 30 years—and that while we might be entering the post-PC era for consumers, we’re not for business now, and may not for another 10 to 15 years. While the cloud is the platform for consumers, the corporate environment is just starting to evaluate this, and it will take years for a large-scale migration.
Next up was Mark Lewis, president of the information Intelligence Group at EMC. He declared that even in the enterprise market, we are seeing a movement away from IT control; he expects a changing delivery model for applications, so that in 3 to 5 years, most people will be spending most of the day on a non-PC device. He saw a world where data primarily resides in “cloud storage” but is cached on the “edge.”
The Market’s Future
These different points of view led to some different views of how the market would look going forward.
Mahmoud said the market was growing, with room for everything: the phone, the tablet, and the PC. “The question is how will they work together.” He thinks bandwidth will always be slower than the content created to use it, and that coming applications such as face recognition, vivid graphics processing, and high-end imaging will require a tremendous amount of computing power. So the issue is delivering that performance at the right cost with the right power draw.
Huang said every ARM-based implementation was working on that, and while “nothing goes away… what will be relevant is growth.”
Peggy Johnson, Qualcomm Executive Vice President for the Americas and India of Qualcomm, believes the big issue is the need for lower-power devices, particularly for use in emerging markets where electricity delivery is spotty. She also said there was not enough wireless spectrum available for all the data bits, so figuring out what to optimize was going to be a big issue going forward.
According to Lewis, a big advantage of the cloud world is that there is a single implementation of each application, which is much easier to maintain than traditional enterprise applications. He sees a big market in “big data and big analytics.”
As for me, I wondered about the thought that new applications are going to be Web-based and platform-independent. We’ve seen lots of “apps” written for mobile devices, and even cloud-based applications tend to be written for specific server platforms. It would have been interesting to have folks from the PC vendors, or Intel and Microsoft, in the discussion as well. But it is clear that that more and more people will access the Web and applications from “post-PC” devices, and that trend does presage an exciting time in computing.
For more on Michael Miller’s take on technology, read his blog Forward Thinking.
O2task's Blog 