On Wednesday, January 9, 2013 4:44:36 PM UTC-8, andjarnic wrote: > > Clearly you are taking this to an extreme.. my point was..given that > *most* phone devices don't get too hot that they would need a large cooling > system to keep it cool, >
I disagree. Most phone devices get hot enough that they would need such a system if there were lots of them. > and the fairly decent processing power of current devices, my point was, > it would be possible, to some extent, barring a few variables, such as > those you have brought up, to build a decent *little* server farm to handle > some sort of load. I am not saying google should replace their search > engine servers with smart phones by any means. > But at what level of equivalence? There's no evidence that you are correct about the heat; indeed there's contrary evidence. There's no evidence that four, three, two, or even one $400 phone could handle the load that even a $300 off-the-rack box could deliver. There's no evidence that your proposal would equal the throughput of even a low-end server for the same cost, same energy, or same temperature requirements. On the contrary, I think it would be far more expensive and harder to achieve decent performance with smartphones, based on what I know about them. Including the fact that they get hot. > > Yes.. a typical wifi-n would be screwed under the load of thousands of > phones on the same wifi network, but then, we'd probably consider that we'd > opt for a few wifi networks, on different physical network routers to help > distribute that load a bit. I am sorry I didn't take this to the extreme > you did and make it sound practical for a company like google [sic] to > actually do this. What if we, for the sake of your argument, throw in > wifi-ac? That's 1.3gbps wifi.. would that help things along? > And there goes your cost savings using smartphones (assuming there ever were any). And you brought up Google, not me. I'm only making the point that smartphones are not competitive as servers, at any scale. I don't believe they'd work for small servers either. And why pay for magnetometers, NFC chips, phone circuits, and a thousand expensive batteries not germane to server usage? On the face of it, smartphones would make terrible servers at any scale. Lew wrote: > >> Lew wrote: >> >>> andjarnic wrote: >>> >>>> ... I could see where rather than buying a beefy multi-cpu 2+ rack >>>> system, you could put a bunch of these in place as servers to handle a few >>>> dozen or so requests and with almost no heat and enough power and memory >>>> to >>>> handle the requests.. a farm of these could possibly be comparable to much >>>> more expensive, heat dissipating hardware that runs multiple vms. At the >>>> very least it would be pretty cool to see a table full of hundreds of >>>> these, all via wifi, just servicing web requests ;) >>>> >>> >>> How much heat is "almost no heat", really? >>> >>> What about the hardware and systems to distribute the load of hundreds >>> or thousands of requests to servers that can only handle a dozen at a >>> time? >>> >>> Are we *quite* sure that the heat generated would be "almost" none? My >>> smart phone >>> occasionally gets blazingly hot, as has every cell phone I've ever owned. >>> >>> You need to *measure* the heat, and power consumption, and cost of >>> replacing batteries >>> and other such costs, to be sure that you are getting the best server >>> bang for the buck. >>> >>> I see lots of ways your assertions could be completely wrong. >>> >>> Oh, and the poor WiFi system will collapse under that bandwidth. >> >> Real server farms have hundreds, or even thousands of servers - >> full-size, >> not phone-sized - in a single data center, connected by >> ultra-ultra-high-bandwidth >> pipes. I do not find the claim that smartphones could compete credible. >> > -- Lew -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
