| I once tried to pitch a one "mobile ecommerce website as a service" company in Vancouver to go for GPU based image rescaler at around 2011. A very dumb proposal: no caching, resize on the fly, the gpu has many gigabits of resizing performance for as long as JPEG is involved. One GPU works in decoding with VDPAU, one in encoding with CUDA. That knocked down any google app engine based "elastic" service on economic basis, but the catch is that you have to send that GPU resizer to every colo. That did not work out as with google app engine you were getting access for google's POP network for almost free, and they were already paying for gigantic amount of CDN traffic. ---- When I worked as sub-subcontractor for the Alibaba's RDMA wired DC project, there was one demo by another team where they got DSP devs involved and they got a 10GB/s JPEG transcoders for under 100W. I think, most of power budget was going to the FPGA that was linking it all with the NIC :/ An expensive toy, but it again demonstrated to me just how powerful is the "lockdown" power of all those "cloud" companies. You can not buy anything like this on the open market. Imagine what it could've been if they offered something more cash worthy over the RDMA there. I said long ago that the killed product during the Bitcoin boom was not the mining itself, but leasing and renting the rigs. Your capital costs get covered near instantly, and you can cash out the next week. I believe that all that "cloud" thing will eventually follow this path. |