PC-over-IP with a new twist

Companies, such as Sun and HP, seem to have tried many times before to get rid of office PCs by replacing them with thin clients whose sole purpose was to connect to the datacenter that hosted all the necessary applications, and server them to employees. Well, most of the initial experiments in this area don’t seem to have worked out very well, given the fact that the majority of office cubicles still host a PC or its equivalent; however, a startup called Taradici out of Vancouver, Canada hopes to change this in the near future.  Other than the fact that the company name sounds more like an Italian restaurant than anything else, the technology that Teradici has developed seems rather interesting. The idea behind the company is that through the use of specialized image-processing algorithms, in combination with a custom silicon implementation, the above mentioned concept will finally be realized. The image below, taken from their website, gives a nice little illustration about how this is going to work:

Teradici claims several major advantages, including: patented display compression and propagation over networks, hardware bridging for peripherals and audio, wire-speed encryption of all data traffic, and complete operating system independence. Additionally, due to the proprietary image data handling, the theoretical distance between the portal and the host can be extended by several orders of magnitude. All the above is implemented through a custom chipset, implemented in 130nm,  that comprises the TERA1100 PC-over-IP Portal Processor and the TERA1200 PC-over-IP Host Processor. The TERA portal as shown in the image above, consumes only 15W of power, which is significantly less than a standard desktop. But what about companies that give their employees laptops instead of desktops? Laptops already consume significantly less power, and using VNC or similar software, a datacenter hosting applications can be reached without a problem. Will Teradici be able to convince employers that their TERA portal is a better solution? This leads to an interesting questions: could an even lower power version of the TERA1100 processor be developed to be integrated into notebooks? This would enable employees to work better remotely because of the reduced application lag that is commonly associated with VNC over VPN connections. Further, security could also be improved because of the integrated encryption, and all this while leaving the workforce nice and mobile at the same time.