[z3t4]

We will eventually go full server rendering and just stream every frame to a thin client. We have good enough network now with gbe consumer bandwith and less then 1ms latency up to 50km. But we need more powerful, smaller and cheaper servers.

[colemickens]

>We will eventually go full server rendering and just stream every frame to a thin client.

You just described every single non-SPA...

[z3t4]

No, I mean more like a remote desktop experience.

[_puk]

How does that make economical sense?

I can pay to render everything for my user, essentially streaming their webpage to them. Or for the potential cost of a slightly slower page load I can offset the cost of all that rendering to their xGHz multi core CPU that's likely sitting idle.

Not to mention the cacheability of the data.

[jjnoakes]

Because bloating your client's experience has negative effects too: lower battery life, lower performance, higher memory usage, ...

[z3t4]

It would make digital rights management (DRM) easier. Companies already spend a lot of money on DRM. There are already services today that lets you use a remote desktop for computer-aided design (CAD) work or gaming. But as you said, it's not economical yet.

[izym]

Latency is certainly not 1 ms for a video frame in desktop resolution. It also means lower visual quality due to the fact that video compression would be needed to make it even slightly possible. Also, how many people actually have a GbE connection to the internet?

[z3t4]

The 1ms is network overhead, witch is nothing considering how long it takes for the image to render on the screen. The CPU and the GPU could be several miles apart.

[izym]

> The 1ms is network overhead, witch is nothing considering how long it takes for the image to render on the screen.

Yes, latency for a single bit of payload to ever hit the client. The rest of the data then needs to be transferred as well. Transferring that amount of data constantly would be terrible with regards to battery life.

> The CPU and the GPU could be several miles apart.

How exactly? Would you send draw commands over the internet?

[z3t4]

More data sent via carriers means they will be able to negotiate better deals and peering. So when 10Gbe hits the consumer market, they will let their users have 10Gbe downstream bandwidth, like a HDMI cable. With some compression you could stream 60 fps + sound. Sure it would use a lot of power, but the usage would foremost not be mobile devices, more like TV's for gaming, and workstations for other programs, BC to PC full circle. You could probably do a lot of optimizations like using a vector format, to drastically decrease bandwidth. I do not know exacly how it can be implemented technically, please give me break ... Some times things can be turned upside down and it's really hard to change your way of thinking, like HDDs gets faster then RAM or networks is almost as fast as internal buses. Not saying it is like that today, but it might be soon and it will be hard to break out of old design patterns.