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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Microsoft Research and the Georgia Institute of Technology have created WearDrive [microsoft.com], a system that uses Bluetooth Low Energy or Wi-Fi to offload processing tasks [technet.com] from wearables to more powerful smartphones.

The researchers tested an Android 4.4 reference smartwatch using 512 MB of RAM and were able to obtain "up to" 8.85x better performance while stretching battery life "up to" 3.69x (i.e. 27% as much energy was used). Large, energy-intensive tasks are performed on the smartphone while small, energy-efficient tasks are performed locally using battery-backed RAM (referred to as BB-RAM throughout the paper). The WearCache system can hold data in RAM until your smartphone is in range, writing to NAND only when RAM fills up.

Original Submission