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posted by janrinok on Tuesday May 08 2018, @06:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the Oh,-that's-what-it-means! dept.

What is edge computing?

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @10:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @10:53PM (#677219)

    I have never worked anywhere ever that thought that Windows was inescapable and an unmanagable nightmare--leading to the conclusion to push it all into the Cloud.

    No, the people in charge wanted to save money and get rid of all that equipment and people supporting it.

    you speak like you were one of the people responsible for the layoffs and outsourcing, and have to come up with some reason to rationalize it.