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The word edge in this context means literal geographic distribution. Edge computing is computing that's done at or near the source of the data, instead of relying on the cloud at one of a dozen data centers to do all the work. It doesn't mean the cloud will disappear. It means the cloud is coming to you. [...] One great driver for edge computing is the speed of light. If a Computer A needs to ask Computer B, half a globe away, before it can do anything, the user of Computer A perceives this delay as latency. The brief moments after you click a link before your web browser starts to actually show anything is in large part due to the speed of light. Multiplayer video games implement numerous elaborate techniques to mitigate true and perceived delay between you shooting at someone and you knowing, for certain, that you missed.
Voice assistants typically need to resolve your requests in the cloud, and the roundtrip time can be very noticeable. Your Echo has to process your speech, send a compressed representation of it to the cloud, the cloud has to uncompress that representation and process it — which might involve pinging another API somewhere, maybe to figure out the weather, and adding more speed of light-bound delay — and then the cloud sends your Echo the answer, and finally you can learn that today you should expect a high of 85 and a low of 42, so definitely give up on dressing appropriately for the weather.
So, a recent rumor that Amazon is working on its own AI chips for Alexa should come as no surprise. The more processing Amazon can do on your local Echo device, the less your Echo has to rely on the cloud. It means you get quicker replies, Amazon's server costs are less expensive, and conceivably, if enough of the work is done locally you could end up with more privacy — if Amazon is feeling magnanimous.
The phrase seems to be popping up more this week due to developments at Microsoft's Build 2018 conference:
Microsoft delivers new edge-computing tools that use its speech, camera, AI technologies
Wikipedia's article, complete with multiple issues.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:40PM (6 children)
...How is this different from processing locally on the user's machine? We been doing that since, well, since computers were invented. Please excuse my confusion and lack of excitement for new seemingly useless terminology.
(Score: 4, Funny) by sonamchauhan on Tuesday May 08 2018, @09:04PM (4 children)
Ah, the difference :? ... you no longer own (or access) the software you run.. In fact, the edge compute provider can even be running a coin miner on your node, and you won't know.
In short, the cloud is you.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:02AM (3 children)
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday May 09 2018, @12:00PM (2 children)
Very difficult, but not impossible. On your local machine you can run a process monitor. On your local machine you can get build a low-level monitor to observe hardware level interactions. On your local machine you can build a dedicated and separate hardware level interface monitor for any component of your system, including running a second PC as a sniffer off your ethernet (or other) connection to search out unauthorized activity. On your local machine you can get open source software and either compile yourself and/or compare compile hashes. (Which I realize you were talking about proprietary blobs, so I mostly focused on how you can empirically monitor your system.)
You know, the sorts of things that otaku types do because we can.
Tell me how you do those things with most cloud solutions.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 09 2018, @02:28PM
Well - thanks for a new word, I guess. I'll probably forget it real soon, because it ain't English. Otaku. I'll keep OCD to describe to describe that kind of people. Of course, if I do remember it, I can use it at work to describe some of my coworkers . . .
(Score: 1) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday May 09 2018, @10:17PM
Completely agree. Plus you could do a memory dump and decompile, if you wanted to (some apps more easily than others). That may or may not have been illegal but it kept vendors honest.
Now this 'trust but verify' ability is gone. The IoT era is turning into the IoLDD era: locked down devices.
The Xbox, azure Kinect, kindle, echo ... are all IoLDD. With some kindles you can't even snoop network interactions without illegal kit
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Tuesday May 08 2018, @10:52PM
It's no different, it's just a new name for old idea. You have to keep selling the ideas to the new batch of managers and marketing spergs though. It's just the way it is.
I've heard Edge Computing used to describe the processing and accumulation that microcontrollers do with sensor input and other logged data. It gets processed down into more useful and comprehensible information and then transmitted to "the cloud" when it's possible to do so or when convenient. Not all sensor packages and other equipment operate in an environment where they can be in continuous & reliable contact to a network.
There is a gold rush on for data right now. More and better sensors in everything to feed the training sets of machine learning algorithms.