If our brains are energy misers, maybe the real supercomputers are the ones that can do more with less—not the ones with the most flops. This could reframe how we design efficient algorithms and even AI: sometimes, the best strategy isn’t processing power, but predictive efficiency.
Maybe the next breakthrough in cloud computing isn’t more cores or larger GPUs, but better energy allocation and anticipation, just like the brain.
Isn't that what is happening on the whole, going from soccer field energy guzzling hardware to laptop to mobile and server farm processors like ARM that are reasonably energy-efficient? There's only that much energy you can squeeze into a small space, so efficiency becomes a bottleneck.
What good is having all data and knowledge somewhere else than in your pocket when and where you need it, so having computing devices in form factors convenient for human beings must be a major driving factor.
Remains to be seen if everything will still revolve around data centres or if devices will start talking to each other in the future, which might be a more democratic way to go.
Maybe the next breakthrough in cloud computing isn’t more cores or larger GPUs, but better energy allocation and anticipation, just like the brain.