Comments on: Soon It Will Be Cheaper to Compute Than to Cache

By: Push

Push — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 02:46:03 +0000

The value is in the ability to customize streaming content/advertising on the fly – otherwise it would still be cheaper overall to use transcoding technology and to store several versions of the content ahead of time. For example, for scalability, one would have to have these GPUs at each of the node of a CDN where several disk versions of the pre-transcoded content would otherwise suffice.

The economics to watch is not just compute vs. disk costs but whether the increased monetization from customization would exceed the increased cost of computing.

On the comments about thousands of different devices – they don’t use thousands of content formats.

p.s On the other trend of storing all the data online, it is true that for majority of consumer media activity that would suffice. No one can possibly store all available data locally anyway. Nonetheless cheaper bandwidth does not mean lower speed of light – so for performance reasons as well as for disconnected operations – several applications will continue to benefit from local copies of data.

By: Sam Blackman

Sam Blackman — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:42:11 +0000

Hi folks,

Really good set of points. On the power consumption issue, it’s going to be interesting. As ophirk points out, if there is nothing done to customize the video for the end user, than it will take a long time for compute time to be cheaper / consume less power than storage. However, as I note at the end of the video, if customizing the video based on the end user (product placement, etc) to increase monetization is required, then the real-time processing that has to happen obviates the need to store hundreds of renditions. I talked about this a bit at the end of the video above.

By: ophirk

ophirk — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:39:05 +0000

I agree to the comment above that storage will still be much cheaper, if you think about moving to SSD technology which consumes even less power.
I think it has to be calculated according to the application. In real time video processing , it might make sense, but when there is a lot of identical copies that can be prepared ahead time it is very hard to compete.

By: Raja

Raja — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:18:44 +0000

i always had this thought on increasing bandwidth and increasing cost for the space, there should be good business here.

i’ve a wrote a blog post on this topic too.
http://diamontip.com/?p=434

By: diamontip.com » Blog Archive » update on technology, money and personality

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:17:59 +0000

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By: jdk

jdk — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 06:26:37 +0000

Where’s the power usage in this comparison? With a modern GPU pulling down nearly 200 watts at load, data centers would be hard pressed to scale out many GPU’s and cool them, whereas storage uses relatively no power (less than GPU’s idling). Storage is also more flexible in workloads, because it can be used for anything, but GPU’s are only utilized for specialized applications.