SAN DIEGO — The marriage of computing and cellphone technology is about to get a lot more interesting, with phones acting more like computer servers in a data center, and computers looking more like phones.
The CTIA Show
Dispatches from the wireless industry’s fall event.
The average smartphone has the processing power that the personal computer did only a few years back. It ably runs Angry Birds and keeps you up on Twitter feeds (and makes phone calls, if that is still your thing). But soon they will need to take on another chore: Distilling data from the world around us.
The explosion of sensors, by one estimate 140 per person by 2013, up from five per person now, will create huge loads of data. Sending all the raw information they collect into big computing centers could cause a lot of unnecessary congestion.
Sandy Huffaker for The New York TimesPaul Jacobs.
Driving computing is the near-term big thing for us, said Paul Jacobs, chief executive of Qualcomm, a leading maker of chips for cellphones. A pacemaker connected to the network to monitor patient health, he noted, records almost 100,000 beats a day. You cant do that at a large scale. Phones can monitor the patient, and reduce the data. Unless something goes drastically wrong, which would require the phone to send an alert to the hospital, consolidated information would be sent to a hospital computer less often and more efficiently by phone. Security becomes a huge issue for this, so does safety, along with data reduction, he said in an interview during the CTIA cellphone industry conference here.
Video over the phones gets a lot of attention as the next big function for smartphone computing power, Mr. Jacobs noted. He said monitoring and compressing business information, along with managing relationships with other connected devices, may be where the computing power goes.
Even if each sensor dont generate a lot of data each, there will be so many of them that it will add up, he said.
This is, of course, a useful argument from a chief executive whose company is all about making powerful chips for wireless devices. Qualcomm is also working on a wireless connectivity standard, called Flashlink, that would enable phones to identify and interact with devices from up to a kilometer away. The applications range from home and office monitoring (getting the phone to work with a projector, say, to run a slide show) to identifying friends carrying similar devices. It is probably five or more years away, but could make connected devices even more attractive.
But Mr. Jacobs’s observation also fits what has become a common model in the history of networked computing. First the computers at the center of a network become powerful; then the computers at the edge, the consumer and ordinary business devices, acquire more power and functionality, challenging the processing power of the center.
As companies like
Google and
Microsoft build enormous data centers, the strong computing core has appeared. If history is any guide, the edge will in turn become powerful. Indeed, the recent
Silk browser released with
Amazon’s Fire tablet computer apportions tasks in just such an edge-core way, supporting Mr. Jacob’s prediction.
At the same time, another function of wireless phones — computing at power low enough to work on small batteries — is becoming attractive for other devices, including tablet computers and the computer servers in data centers, Mr. Jacobs said.
The Windows 8 tablet from Microsoft, expected in about a year with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip inside, “will collect data in a standby mode, like a phone,� Mr. Jacobs said. “It will be a fundamental difference for people.They are not used to that.� The device will turn on immediately, fully updated.
Mr. Jacobs also noted that Qualcomm is working on devices that allow for input from gestures. (You can see a
brief video of it.) Microsoft, which in July
published patents on gesture
technology at a tablet-sized level, would not comment on the features of its next device.
Computer servers, stacked by the thousands in big data centers, now consume worrisome amounts of electricity. With that in mind, some computer makers are looking at adapting the designs of
ARM, another phone chip company, for servers. “There is no question that ARM will end up in the data center,� Mr. Jacobs said. “When you are in the mobile industry, you focus on power.�
ARM sells its designs, however, while Qualcomm focuses on high-value systems on its chips, including things like video and security as well as radio connections and computing. Phone chips in the server business, Mr. Jacobs said, “are not our main focus. Phones are still such a big market.�
Source: IDC WW Server Tracker (1995-2004 systems data) and internal analysis; 2005-2010 Intel shipments; 2011-2015 DCG forecast.A slide from Kirk Skaugen’s presentation shows that the computer server market will double in the next five years.
