It’s Mobile World Congress 2011 this week, and amongst the throngs of Honeycomb tablets, Nokia and Microsoft square dancing on the showroom floor, there are a few announcements that may not be hugely exciting to the general public, but that the tech community should be giggling with glee about.
I’m talking about this:
Kal-El benchmark, courtesy of Anandtech
This is Nvidia announcing the Kal-El SoC (System on Chip), a 12-core Tegra 2 GPU mixed with a quad-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU, all on one chip. Even better yet, this chip will be seen in tablet computers in 6 months time. That’s an incredibly aggressive timeline considering the brand new Tegra 2 chip is only 9 days old, and yet it’s performance has already been doubled.
The even bigger news that has slipped by, is that that’s not all.
Tegra 2 roadmap, courtesy of Anandtech
Notice the scale on the left hand side. Whilst the new chips are rising in a linear fashion, that’s a logarithmic scale, so every year, these chips will double in power. By 2014, we should have SoCs in mobile computers that are 4 times as fast as a Core i7 CPU and 25 times faster than a Core2 Duo. That’s an amazing amount of computational power in a chip the size of a peanut with a TDP of ~1W.
Modern UIs need this power
So what are we going to do with all this power? Whilst it’ll be like having an XBox 360 in your pocket, games aren’t the only thing that will use this power.
Just take a look at Microsoft’s Beauty of the Web demo site, showing off IE9′s hardware acceleration enabling it to make blizzards with HTML5 web technologies. That’s just the start of what we’ll be able to do with this power. Think how useful Honeycomb’s 3D Google maps will be, and think how it can be used to empower a mobile workforce, being able to take your entire desktop with you and have it work like your desktop pc. It will enable the mobile user to process huge data sets which previously would have been a server job, letting the workforce make complex decisions quickly and on the move.
Of course, don’t expect things to change overnight. The first things to happen will be “true” multi-tasking, then a proliferation of HD video including Skype. It’s taken years for web developers to embrace CSS3 functions, it’ll take another few years to truly embrace canvas, SVG and WebGL.
The future vision is coming
At CES 2009, Microsoft showed off a video for their Office of 2019 concept (below). The hardware announced today will drive this forward and enable developers to make these UIs of the future. I can’t wait to be part of this future
I came up onto the District line platform at South Kensington station this morning just as a train pulled in. Normally, I would find my door (the one that opens straight onto the exit at Victoria) and jump in, but this time, whilst minding the gap, I brushed past a man trying to work on his laptop.
Seriously. A man trying to work on his laptop. Whilst stood up. On a busy rush-hour train in central London.
I was astonished at a few things:
the man’s ability to hold a 15″ old-school laptop on a moving train
his lack of forethought in trying to edit a private word document on a very public train
his inability to use something more appropriate
It’s this last thing that really gets to me. At my work, I’m trying to bring my clients to the modern world by freeing their data and mobilising their workforce. This man exemplifies why I’m trying to do these things. It’s simply not feasible to work on the move without a device built for mobility, and no, not even a Macbook Air would have been suitable for this kind of use. A 7 to 10 inch device would have worked, something that isn’t going to endanger the passengers stood next to you if the train brakes suddenly, something that won’t run out of battery before you get into the office. Yet, conversely, something that you can access everything you need at work from your device.
As the PunchCut blog said, “Mobile is not a device, it’s a lifestyle“. Bosses: embrace this. Let your employees use their own phones and tablets to access data. If you don’t let them, they will find a way around it because the busy people of this world simply can’t work the old way any more: there’s just too much to do.
This is the year that businesses should be unleashing their employees. Give them the freedom to work the way they want to (like working from home and flexi time have done) and they will pay dividends, simply by being happier. A happy employee is a productive employee, and when you let that happy employee out of the office, they will tell their friends and be happier still.
So don’t let your employees be the ones stood on the tube holding a laptop, be the ones leaning by the doors, smiling at their iPad.
