Graphics guru Jon Peddie came to this week's Game Developer Conference to talk about open application programming interfaces, but wound up second-guessing Ray Kurzweil and predicting the rise of a new diskless notebook category he has dubbed "cloud clients."
Peddie, principal analyst at Tiburon, Calif.-based Jon Peddie Research, did have quite a few things to say about the benefits of cross-platform, royalty-free APIs like OpenGL and OpenCL during his Tuesday talk at a Khronos Group-sponsored forum in San Francisco. For one thing, he expects that both the upcoming DirectX 11 APIs and the Khronos Group's relatively new OpenCL standard for general-purpose parallel programming of heterogeneous systems will wrestle programmer share away from Nvidia's CUDA in the coming months.
Not that Nvidia will be hurting -- Peddie made it clear that he thinks the overall market for general-purpose GPU (GP-GPU) computing will be growing enough to accommodate all three APIs comfortably. Besides, Nvidia is more interested in selling a lot of its GPUs rather than marketing a proprietary programming platform. To that effect, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company doesn't wall off its GPUs, making products that are compatible with the CUDA, OpenCL and DirectX Compute open-development standards.
But our ears really pricked up when Peddie went off the beaten API track and starting talking about inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil's proposed "singularity" -- a theoretical point in the not-so-far-off future when computers that have matched or exceeded the processing power and flexibility of the human brain become self-aware. This would kick off a period of extremely rapid, exponentially increasing technological progress as A.I.s are able to generate their own better, smarter successors faster and faster in "accelerating returns" of self-improvement. Eventually, in Kurzweil's vision, they turn the entire universe into a giant computer, but that's getting ahead of ourselves.
Kurzweil, who recently launched a "Singularity University" to educate well-heeled technology enthusiasts about this frankly unsettling prospect and other tech-driven developments, thinks computers will match organic processing power by about 2023 and that the singularity itself is going to happen around 2045.
Peddie begs to differ -- he thinks rapid advances in GP-GPU computing mean that our prospective robot overlords could appear as early as 2015, or at least that a $1,000 computer could be able to match the human brain in terms of FLOPS in just half a decade. Whether these potentially self-aware intelligences would be "our friends, our helpers or something else," Peddie left up to his audience's imagination.
Moving to less controversial matters -- but only just slightly, if you happen to sell client storage devices -- Peddie also predicted the rise of a new mobile PC category he calls "cloud clients." These would essentially be diskless notebooks and netbooks, featuring screens from 9 to 12 inches, that basically do pretty much everything via an Internet connection.
The analyst thinks the rise of netbooks and cloud computing has opened the door for the full monty -- a mobile PC targeted at businesses and government that promises absolutely zero data that can be compromised if the unit is stolen or lost.
