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How The IoT Will Change The Chip (techcrunch.com)
"Get ready for some big changes in the 'silicon' of Silicon Valley," writes tech CEO Narbeh Derhacobian who argues that the need to build tens of billions of connected sensor devices will change the way computers get built. "Just like smartphone owners like to pick and choose which apps they want, IoT manufacturers may want to shop for components individually without being locked into a single fab." An anonymous reader summarizes his article on TechCrunch:
Thousands of different hardware devices, each selling around one million units, "would suggest the need for a much greater diversity of chip configurations than we've seen to date." Currently smartphones are engineered using a "System on a Chip" design where all the components are "locked into a single manufacturing process," but Derhacobian predicts chip manufacturers will continue a trend of moving towards a "System in a Package" approach -- "packing components closely together, without the complete, end-to-end integration... In a smart, connected world, sensor requirements could vary greatly from factory to factory, not to mention between industries as varied as agriculture, urban planning and automotive."
"In some ways, the great trends of the PC and smartphone eras were toward standardization of devices. Apple's great vision was understanding that people prefer a beautiful, integrated package, and don't need many choices in hardware. But in software it's generally the opposite. People have different needs, and want to select the apps and programs that work best for them."
"In some ways, the great trends of the PC and smartphone eras were toward standardization of devices. Apple's great vision was understanding that people prefer a beautiful, integrated package, and don't need many choices in hardware. But in software it's generally the opposite. People have different needs, and want to select the apps and programs that work best for them."
They'd grab whatever components were cheapest at the time and put them together to build a PC. You'd buy one Acer model PC, really like it and recommend it to a friend who would buy the exact same model, and his would come with completely different components and suck. It's how Acer earned their reputation as a low-rate PC manufacturer that they're still trying to shake today. Routers occasionally run into this problem as well, as hardware changes from revision 2 to revision 3 result in incompatibilities or different behaviors even though two routers are "the same model."
If you want to dumb down the software and use non-standardized hardware, be my guest. But you'd better make damn sure the user experience is consistent across all the different hardware versions you're using. Otherwise you're saving money on the front end just to end up paying more at the support end.
Just like all the other times, the home will be the last place where IoT is applied. It will rule the commercial and industrial world for a generation or two before hoi polloi trusts it in the home. We will see bridge beams that continually report their own stresses, freight containers that log their location, aircraft that log flight data to satellites instead of to onboard black boxes, and building load compensation weights that continually adjust themselves.