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To: Boplicity who wrote (26340)	12/24/1997 5:41:00 PM
From: Meathead	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 176388

There will be big opportunity in home servers however, IMO it won't happen as soon as I'd like to see it. It only makes sense and would be a logical next step but there's a few hurdles. Likely, 5 years before it really changes our home to server-centric control rather than scattered single PCs. By this time, Internet appliances will be hot items as well. This will undoubtedly expand the market well beyond what single powerful Desktop PCs are capable of. Believe it or not, there will be tremendous margin and profit opportunities all over the place... more than today. The reason being Moores law. Once a product technology matures, it needs no more power, just refinements, prices will collapse to achieve WW penetration. But Moores law is still alive and kickin and there's still a lotta stuff that hasn't even been invented yet. Selling 1 Billion $99 Internet appliances will not kill the need for computing power. Margins will be all over the place and depend on what market you're developing product for and selling into. My only beef with the article is they underestimate the potential capabilities of a home server therefore, underestimate the power needed. The home server will need to be able to simultaneously run your home entertainment center in the living room, bedroom, family room (DVD, Interactive TV, stereo), compute intensive games, web surfing, productivity apps etc. at all of the PC terminals throughout the house. It will also need to control all home climate control, appliances, lighting, security, etc. etc. With the introduction of USB and Firewire, conceiveably, everything from your toaster to the engine control unit diagnostics of your automobile will plug into server control. Communication ports in the home will be as ubiquitous as power outlets. You get the idea, start looking around your home and you quickly realize how much of a burden a server could become tasked with.... and if it can be done... it will be done. With that in mind... obviously a home server would need very fast I/O throughput and tremendous storage capacity. As well, CPU burden would not be trivial either... to run multiple applications simultaneously, smoothly, multiple CPU's will be needed... minimum a 2 way system, probably 4 way on average with future scalability options. Yes but memory and HD space is cheap you say. Look for memory requirements in the 1 to 4 Gigabyte range and HD space in the 100GigaByte range. In 5 years, this won't be too expensive but it will be equivelant to a $3000 system today. Believe it or not, the fatter and faster the pipe becomes, the CPU power required to adequately manipulate the content to our satisfaction increases. MEATHEAD