The battle for Cloud will give us the computer device of the future

Giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon have been battling it out for the Cloud and its Big Data. To win this battle they are building enormous data centres to store personal and public data. The cost, capacity and computer power of the data centres decide who wins this business worth millions. At the core of the centres are powerful microprocessors built by companies such as Intel. Google has decided to go a different route and is making its own chips. One of those chips, the TPU, has already saved the company millions because it needed less data centres. That is good for Google and its clients, but it has a secondary effect as well. It forces chip producers such as Intel to build faster, better and cheaper chips which are more electricity efficient. This way cloud builders, like Apple who also uses their own chips, stimulate the development of future computer devices. Before long every smartphone, tablet or smartwatch will have more computing power than desktop computers and against a much lower price. Combined with new features such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and speech recognition it is beyond imagination what future computer devices can offer.

Read more about Google´s TPU project as an example of this trend in Wired.