vk6flab@lemmy.radio 2 days ago
One of the fundamental differences between phones, laptops, desktops, and beyond is size. While that sounds obvious, it also means that the amount of processing within the device is constrained by that size.
The constraints relate to how much energy can be used by each device and more importantly, how much cooling is available for the system.
It means that there’s a physical limit on how much work each device can do without being unusable.
While miniaturization is a factor, it’s not linear and you can only get so small before you fail.
So, depending on what you want to do in any given time, the device you use will dictate what’s physically possible.
Unfortunately what the other commenter replied is happening instead.
I will take this opportunity to drop one of my favorite tropes: even 10 years ago, every smartphone had millions of times more computing power than the complete computing power used during the moon landing in '69.
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Compute can be outsourced to the cloud (not that I think that’s good, but it does lift the limit on small devices)
vk6flab@lemmy.radio 2 days ago
For some workloads it’s true that you can do the heavy lifting on a more powerful remote machine and transport the results back to an endpoint device like a phone. Websites are a good relatable example of that, as are services like YouTube.
It’s not universally applicable for many activities that computers are involved with, data analysis, record keeping, simulations and a myriad of other processes.
Blurring of the lines between these different orders of magnitude is made possible by faster and faster networks, but that’s physically not able to beat processing done inside a single device.
The more powerful we make computers, the more complex problems we use them for. I suspect that this is unlikely to change as computers evolve.