Chicago (IL) – Once in a while we come across a company whose idea and products just make sense. Ncomputing is such a company and it may take some time until you will hear more about its products, but we do believe that the firm has what it takes to popularize cloud computing for the masses and become Intel’s biggest threat yet. We are talking about the ability to split one PC into possibly dozens of sub 5-watt computers with a cost of less than $100 each. To us, it is the first convincing cloud computing idea that has the potential to reach more users than any other computing product before.  

Nine years ago, my editor-in-chief asked me to research a then new Silicon Valley start-up and interview the company’s president for a brief article. Back then, there were thousands of start-up and to deal with one specific one was just another story and you did not expect to hit anything spectacular. The PR director of the 45-people-strong start-up welcomed me in what he called “half-baked” offices and led me to the president’s office, a Stanford student who seemed to be more excited about his 3D mouse and was not concerned about dirty dishes taking up more than half the space of his desk. It was your average over-the-top Internet start-up environment, but this company had a fresh idea how to make information on the Internet available to users and its idea how to monetize that idea was called crazy at the time. But once I had seen the technology in action and had met the minds behind it, I told my editor-in-chief that this company would replace Yahoo and our Internet publication should change its advertising model.

The company today has more than 16,000 employees, the president was Sergey Brin and the company was Google.

Ncomputing feels just like it. It operates under the radar of the big boys, but makes visible progress in a high-growth area that needs innovation. To me, Ncomputing can be, with determination and luck, the next Google. Here is why.


Ncomputing: How to create an $11 computing device

Last week, Cherrypal launched its $250 cloud computer with an innovative approach to attract average computer users who don’t want to edit videos and play games, but simply browse the Internet, write emails, watch YouTube and create simple documents. Following the story, we were contacted by a representative for Ncomputing – a company I had not heard of at the time – and an offer to provide information about a “$70 PC”. We finally had a chance for a briefing with the company’s chairman and CEO, Stephen Dukker (founder and former CEO of eMachines), to learn more about this cheap PC.

Realistically, calling the Ncomputing devices PCs is not correct, since these boxes do not carry components you would expect to find in a PC – such as a processor, memory or storage devices. Instead, the purpose of the Ncomputing devices is to tap into the horsepower of a single PC to enable the creation of multiple computing stations. The computing devices are access terminals that share the performance provided by a host PC. Up to seven computing devices of Ncomputing’s X-series connect via direct connections, the L-series supports up to 30 users via Ethernet.

Each box carries a minimum of hardware with the main component between an ASIC. The result is an extremely low production cost of about $11 per seat, according to Dukker.  

     
Hardware and software

The base version of Ncomputing’s product line is the X-series. The devices connect via CAT 5 cable to a PCI card with three Ethernet ports that is installed in a host PC. Since there are typically two free PCI ports in a PC, the technology supports up to six connections to Ncomputing boxes. Add the host PC as a computing device and you end up with seven Internet “computers”. Dukker said that a $350 PC with a basic Core 2 Duo processor and 1 GB of memory is enough to power this platform and run, for example, MPEG-2 playback, TV playback via a Sling Player, YouTube video playback, DVD video playback, as well as productivity applications such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Acrobat Reader at the same time.

The power consumption of each computing device is rated at about 1 watt. Since this version uses direct connections, the maximum distance between a host PC and a computing device is 10 m or about 30 ft. The X-series comes in a $200 package, which includes one PCI card and three access terminals – which translates into a cost of $66.67 per seat (not including the host PC.)  

The L-series supports up to 30 computing devices, priced at $150 per seat. The connections are established via Ethernet an Ncomputing claims that a $500 quad-core server would be enough to run all 30 devices, which are rated at a power consumption of 5 watts each.

X-series and L-series networks are glued together by a virtualization software that was developed by a European company (that was merged into Ncomputing) called Hydrapark. This software layer creates a self-contained user environment under one operating system provided by the host PC (Linux and Windows are supported.) Ncomputing bundles the software with the hardware free of charge and claims that it could scale the application to potentially hundreds of seats.   

Read on the next page: What the $70 computing device is and what it is not, Why Intel should watch