There was a time when the Personal Computer chip performance followed the Moore’s Law. Somewhere after the Pentium chip was introduced, the performance enhancement started falling short of the predictions of Moore’s Law. While there are a lot of theories about the reason for the slippage, the most important observation was that the Desktop or Laptop processing power lost its significance with the advent of networking. Now network was your Personal Computer, and you had huge resources at your hand. The semiconductor industry too went into a rethink. After a brief blink, the smartphone started demanding more and more processing power. The semiconductor industry took up the challenge, and you had smartphone CPU performance following the Moore’s law again.
The smartphone had advanced with such great leaps that it now can do match the laptop or the desktop. The smartphone browser is no longer a handicapped contender; it can perform all the functions that a laptop browser can. On the other hand, the concept of cloud computing was slowly removing the reliance on the performance of your laptop or desktop. All you need to work on those number crunching applications was just a browser and a net appliance like Chromebook was enough to work on the cloud.
IT consultants have been debating on the strategy to replace the desktop/laptop in the work environment over a long period of time, with concepts like BYOD and Remote Desktop. In the midst of this debate the semiconductor industry have finally delivered the inevitable device; the computer on a stick.
Computer on a Stick
While the internal components of the laptop were getting squeezed every day, it did not really make much of a difference to the device except that the weight was reduced. The reduction in the size and weight of the laptop had reached its limits as the weight of the battery could not be reduced further and the size was limited by the display size. It was to get out of this crunch that the tablet PC was evolved.
To beat the two factors that impacted the reduction of the size of the personal computing device, the semiconductor industry had to come out with a design that is a bit risk as far as public acceptance was concerned. They have made two assumptions. The first one was that the display and a set of keyboard and mouse are something that you would be having at home and office by default. The second one is that the power to your personal computing device will come through the micro USB port. This made the designers remove the two constraints in reducing the size of the PC. What evolved is the stick computer, more conveniently called as a stick PC. It is a device that looks slightly bigger than an internet dongle which has an HDMI port to stick it into a TV or Monitor.
The device with quad CPUs and 2 GB RAM can have 32 GB of internal storage space in the form of a flash drive. Extra storage can be added using micro SD cards. The Keyboard and mouse connects through Bluetooth. There is a Wi-Fi chip inside to deal with networking. Voila! You have a computer on a stick that can run using Windows or Linux. The best part is that you can carry it on your car keys and use it anywhere as long as you have a display device available.
IT consultants have been debating on the strategy to replace the desktop/laptop in the work environment over a long period of time, with concepts like BYOD and Remote Desktop. In the midst of this debate the semiconductor industry have finally delivered the inevitable device; the computer on a stick.
Computer on a Stick
While the internal components of the laptop were getting squeezed every day, it did not really make much of a difference to the device except that the weight was reduced. The reduction in the size and weight of the laptop had reached its limits as the weight of the battery could not be reduced further and the size was limited by the display size. It was to get out of this crunch that the tablet PC was evolved.
To beat the two factors that impacted the reduction of the size of the personal computing device, the semiconductor industry had to come out with a design that is a bit risk as far as public acceptance was concerned. They have made two assumptions. The first one was that the display and a set of keyboard and mouse are something that you would be having at home and office by default. The second one is that the power to your personal computing device will come through the micro USB port. This made the designers remove the two constraints in reducing the size of the PC. What evolved is the stick computer, more conveniently called as a stick PC. It is a device that looks slightly bigger than an internet dongle which has an HDMI port to stick it into a TV or Monitor.
The device with quad CPUs and 2 GB RAM can have 32 GB of internal storage space in the form of a flash drive. Extra storage can be added using micro SD cards. The Keyboard and mouse connects through Bluetooth. There is a Wi-Fi chip inside to deal with networking. Voila! You have a computer on a stick that can run using Windows or Linux. The best part is that you can carry it on your car keys and use it anywhere as long as you have a display device available.
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