Quantitative Musings on the Feasibility of Smartphone Clouds

"Green" and its "low power" cousin are the new hot spots in computing. In cloud data centers, at scale, ideas of deploying low-power ARM architectures or even large numbers of extremely "wimpy" nodes [1, 2] seem increasingly appealing. Skeptics on the other hand maintain that we cannot get more than what we pay for and no free lunches can be had. In this paper we explore these theses and provide insights into the power-performance trade-off at scale for "wimpy", back-to basics, power-efficient RISC architectures. We use ARM as modern proxy for these and quantify the cost/performance ratio precisely-enough to allow for a broader conclusion. We then offer an intuition as to why this may still hold in 2030.

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