Thursday 4 October I talk on mobile compute at Hackers&Founders Amsterdam on what mobile compute can do. The goal is to initiate new ideas for start-ups, as not many know their mobile phone and tablet is very powerful and next year can be used for compute intensive tasks.

The other talk is from Mozilla on Firefox OS (Edit: it was cancelled), which is actually reason enough to visit this Hackers&Founders Meetup. Entrance is free, drinks are not. Alternatively you could go to the Hadoop User Group Meetup at Science Park, Amsterdam.

Personal computing in 2013

Who is going to buy a new computer, and who prefers buying a new game-console, smartphone or tablet for gaming, basic communication-needs and couch-browsing, respectively? People who buy a new computer are most times forced to, as they are developers or depend on certain software which doesn’t run in a browser.

2012 mobile apps depend mostly on cloud-compute for intensive computations, but this has the disadvantage it needs a continuous connection and uses energy for transporting all the data to and from the cloud-service. Processors in 2013 can do 50 GFLOPs using 0.3 to 3 Watt. Are apps taking advantage of these processors? Hardly. Are new apps being developed which assume this compute-power? Too little.

Mobile gaming only?

The obvious area to explore is mobile gaming. But there are more application areas, which are quite easy to find as this road has been walked before in the PC era. Just add current buzzwords to it, and you see the potential this more powerful processors cause. Another difference is that the mobile processor advances faster than the desktop-processor did. But do you know when the mobile processor is as fast as the desktop-processor? Not many people do.

During the 10-minute talk I will show the graphs that give an idea of the rapid development smartphones and tablets are undergoing. Of course something about the role of OpenCL and the importance of parallel computing in general. Most of the time I will show which desktop-software will run on a mobile phone in what year.

I hope to see you this Thursday in Amsterdam! And hopefully I will see some interesting pitches on Appsterdam the coming months.

The presentation

If you have any question, feel free to ask.