Laptops and Servers

It just dawned on me that in a desk-side box, heat is not a major problem because it’s got a room to cool it off, usually without too many other computers in it. Laptops, however, are like back-room “mainframe” servers in that heat is a big deal. In the one case you’re worried about your users’ gonads and in the other your HVAC budget, but the problem is the same. Right now, the heat budget is a big concern for the guys at Sun who design our biggest servers. It’s no secret that our throughput computing initiative is partly about this: lower clock speeds, more cores, thread-level parallelism. Am I predicting that laptops with SPARC processors will be leaping off the shelves next quarter? I wouldn’t go that far. But I am smelling converging design spaces.