...

So the problems with using smart phones are:
1) Heat buildup.
2) Tethering to a power cord for crunching.
3) (Possible) shortened battery lifetime.
4) Slower processing units.
5) Licensing for some device types.

...

But you forgot innovation factor in open OS environment. Unlike caged environments of Windows and iOS the open Android allow far more innovation advantages to overcome your mentioned Windowsish/iOS-ish constraints.

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Mandtugai!

...

So the problems with using smart phones are:
1) Heat buildup.
2) Tethering to a power cord for crunching.
3) (Possible) shortened battery lifetime.
4) Slower processing units.
5) Licensing for some device types.

...

But you forgot innovation factor in open OS environment. Unlike caged environments of Windows and iOS the open Android allow far more innovation advantages to overcome your mentioned Windowsish constraints.

Even if # 5 were fixed your 2 biggest problems are heat and incredibly slow processing. IIRC the discussion of smart phone processing was discussed before and the biggest problem was the lack of a match coprocessor on those 1Ghz smart phones.

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

...

So the problems with using smart phones are:
1) Heat buildup.
2) Tethering to a power cord for crunching.
3) (Possible) shortened battery lifetime.
4) Slower processing units.
5) Licensing for some device types.

...

But you forgot innovation factor in open OS environment. Unlike caged environments of Windows and iOS the open Android allow far more innovation advantages to overcome your mentioned Windowsish constraints.

Even if # 5 were fixed your 2 biggest problems are heat and incredibly slow processing. IIRC the discussion of smart phone processing was discussed before and the biggest problem was the lack of a match coprocessor on those 1Ghz smart phones.

This is why GPU crunching started with different DC community.

There are tons of young talents out there so I guess people are working despite what views spoken here.

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Mandtugai!

...

So the problems with using smart phones are:
1) Heat buildup.
2) Tethering to a power cord for crunching.
3) (Possible) shortened battery lifetime.
4) Slower processing units.
5) Licensing for some device types.

...

But you forgot innovation factor in open OS environment. Unlike caged environments of Windows and iOS the open Android allow far more innovation advantages to overcome your mentioned Windowsish constraints.

Even if # 5 were fixed your 2 biggest problems are heat and incredibly slow processing. IIRC the discussion of smart phone processing was discussed before and the biggest problem was the lack of a match coprocessor on those 1Ghz smart phones.

This is why GPU crunching started with different DC community.

There are tons of young talents out there so I guess people are working despite what views spoken here.

There are also a lot of old and very experienced talent out that have one thing different from young talent and that is experience.

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While I accept that there are a lot of smartphones and tablets out there, and they now have significantly increased in computing power. But they are only up to the power of a vintage P3. Meanwhile the power of desktop CPU and GPUs has also increased top match.

Sure you can leave your smartphone plugged in each night, and in a week maybe do as much work as a modern entry level desktop does in 30 mins.

Smartphones with 4 or 8 cores vs GPUs with hundreds of cores?

If all you want from your computer is Youtube, facebook, email, weather reports etc then a ARM cpu with some sort of graphic co-processor will suit you fine. Want some serious computing power for real 3D gaming, ray tracing, BOINC in general then you either need a real destop (or workstation) or a HECK of a lot of ARM CPUs connected up.

I can believe there are more mobile CPUs being sold, but desktops out perform them by couple of orders of magnitude. Will mobile CPUs increase in power? Sure. But so will the desktops. Give it a couple of years and you will need a Nvidia 580 GPU to run the new version of Windows.

Ian

According to this statement the upcoming Stark cpu by nvidia will be 20x of Tegra2 or core2duo-7200 which means in 2-3 years smartphones will be serious competition to laptops in muscle counts.

Smart phones will never be as powerful as desktops. Never ever. As Ianab states. Take 3d gaming, I dont think anyone will trade in a desktop to play on a smart phone. Or do CAD CAM on one either.

Some day a smart phone will think its a I7 quad core, But Intel will have a 8core or 12 core out. And throw in some Nvida GPU's that your smart phone will never have.

Like I said at the start of your thread, As long as they make desktops a smart phone will never be as powerful.

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[/quote]

Old James

According to this statement the upcoming Stark cpu by nvidia will be 20x of Tegra2 or core2duo-7200 which means in 2-3 years smartphones will be serious competition to laptops in muscle counts.

Smart phones will never be as powerful as desktops. Never ever. As Ianab states. Take 3d gaming, I dont think anyone will trade in a desktop to play on a smart phone. Or do CAD CAM on one either.

Some day a smart phone will think its a I7 quad core, But Intel will have a 8core or 12 core out. And throw in some Nvida GPU's that your smart phone will never have.

Like I said at the start of your thread, As long as they make desktops a smart phone will never be as powerful.

If you manage to analyse that Morgan stanley figure you supposed to understand certain trends of desktop fate. But let's leave that to its designated audience.

That Stark cpu will one exciting stuff to play with even tegra3 is fine cpu according to that latest benchmark.

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Mandtugai!

According to this statement the upcoming Stark cpu by nvidia will be 20x of Tegra2 or core2duo-7200 which means in 2-3 years smartphones will be serious competition to laptops in muscle counts.

Smart phones will never be as powerful as desktops. Never ever. As Ianab states. Take 3d gaming, I dont think anyone will trade in a desktop to play on a smart phone. Or do CAD CAM on one either.

Some day a smart phone will think its a I7 quad core, But Intel will have a 8core or 12 core out. And throw in some Nvida GPU's that your smart phone will never have.

Like I said at the start of your thread, As long as they make desktops a smart phone will never be as powerful.

They don't have to be as powerful or replace a desktop. Notebooks and netbooks have proven that I think. They just have to have enough grunt to do what you need.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

An interesting thread, on topics I don't fully understand. Came some smart person answer a question please?

How long would one of these new smart phones or tablets take to complete a typical S@H WU? If we know that, we can start talking about what per centage of smart phone users might sign up, what per centage of the day they would crunch, and how that would impact the total project crunching power.

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Not one of the smart people, but I'll hazard a guess and say that in a couple years a Tegra should be able to easily pull your current RAC of ~2000 (assuming 24/7 crunching). So I don't think it's a matter of if, but when...

Currently a PIII takes around 48 hours to complete an average task. Take that and the lack of the FPU and you get a very very slow CPU. I'd hazard a guess at 3-4 days for 1 WU. not exactly a 2k RAC. Heck I have an old AMD 3000+ Chip that can barely muster 350. What makes you think a chip that has no FPU and no HSF to dissipate the heat from all that work is ever going to be viable. To make it work you'd need a phone the size of a standard brick for the HSF and the Battery needed to power all that crunching. I'm pretty sure people would walk away from a phone like that

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

What makes you think ...

I see your $588 Athlon (needing 74 Watts for a dinky little RAC of 268.63) and raise you my 12W ION from my 500 Euro netbook with an RAC of ~1000:)

The times, they are a-changin'...

Take that and the lack of the FPU and you get a very very slow CPU.

Not true. ARM CPUs with VFP or NEON (SIMD) have hardware FP support.

Also, Android will not be exclusively ARM in the future. Don't forget Intel's Medfield x86 platform, which looks very promising.

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Not one of the smart people, but I'll hazard a guess and say that in a couple years a Tegra should be able to easily pull your current RAC of ~2000 (assuming 24/7 crunching). So I don't think it's a matter of if, but when...

This prediction may well turn out to be true.

But a pretty standard desktop with a 1/2 decent GPU will do 20,000 NOW. In a few years that's probably going to be 200,000 RAC. So the portable device is still a couple of orders of magnitude behind.

This has nothing to do with the increased numbers of portable CPUs being sold, and that they do all the computer functions that a significant amount of user actually need/want. It's like laptops took a fair chunk out of the desktop sales a few years back. For some people the portability matters, for others it doesn't, so desktops never ceased to exist. They aren't going vanish because of tablets and smart-phones either.

That's my prediction anyway.

Ian

Yeah.. I hadn't noticed it was the actual OP that took this thread off on a tangent about smartphones overtaking desktops. I thought it was someone else and kinda skimmed through the "Smartphone vs Desktop" comments (dismissing them as irrelevant, tbh). Anyway, when I said

So I don't think it's a matter of if, but when...

what I meant was

So I don't think it's a matter of if (there's gonna be a Boinc app for smartphones and tablets), but when (it'll be released)

Currently at least half billion people have mini crunchers out there wasting it on few games (plus HD games) and watching boring videos. Out of that I'd say 5% of them or 25 million might consider running scientific project on their phones where it can be connected to the power line. Even at current phase of 10 million (or 2%) smartphones each crunch 1 wu for 3-4 days that is still 10 million wu's done in 3 days so would that equal to some 10s thousands of desktop productivity rate?!

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Mandtugai!

Currently at least half billion people have mini crunchers out there wasting it on few games (plus HD games) and watching boring videos. Out of that I'd say 5% of them or 25 million might consider running scientific project on their phones where it can be connected to the power line. Even at current phase of 10 million (or 2%) smartphones each crunch 1 wu for 3-4 days that is still 10 million wu's done in 3 days so would that equal to some 10s thousands of desktop productivity rate?!

I don't foresee people spending lots of money to buy loads of phones for crunching. Being able to use older hardware you have sitting around always seems like a good idea.
However with those super cheap tablets they might be viable as a crunching stack. A lot of those super cheaper ones have shoddy screen. but normally the same processor guts the better ones do. So if you got 2000 RAC for 2.5-5w the performance per watt would be pretty good.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

At present time there are more than 500 million smartphones might have Boinc capability plus at least 100 million tablets are open to Boinc:

This is crazy a lot of raw computing resource mostly wasted on net surfing and gaming. Out of this available 600 million units give it 0.5% of them enroling to boinc means 3 million and if they complete 3-6 million wu's per week that is some sizable job done at present rate. I mean this is very probable minimum productivity level by green-crunchers.

If in more opportunistic side if it is be 2% enrolment rate then that is 12-20 million wu's per week productivity.

In next 10 months total green crunchers will exceed 1 billion which maybe douzens terraflops of crunching power?!

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Mandtugai!

How many PC are their in the whole wide world being used right now and how many of them are crunching I say maybe 5% and these machines are suited to such work.
How many such smart phones out there and how many would do crunching if capable which they are not at the moment if they were capable I would say less then 1% because one would not want to tie up their phone to crunch they want to use it as a phone which it is as a phone and not a computer.

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At modern age young generation will choose green computing rather than bulky wasty desktops (refer to that figure in 2nd post from top). And that kind of computing power is significantly increasing every quarter.

Even desktop generation themselves are live witnesses of mainframes-to-desktop shift during 80s maybe.

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Mandtugai!