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Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

Watson’s nerve center is 10 racks of IBM Power750 servers running in Yorktown Heights, New York, that have the same processing power as 6,000 desktop computers. Even though most of the computations occur at the data center, a Watson smartphone application would still consume too much power for it to be practical today.

So not actually a pocket-sized Watson, but a smartphone app that will connect to Watson. As long as you've got reliable internet access.

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That was also the conclusion I drew, but it makes me wonder why that would take too much power to be practical on a smartphone as the article suggests. It seems like it would only need to capture the text of the question and push it over the network to IBM's servers.

I think what they mean is, the datacenters actually running Watson would consume too much power. A mobile app with millions of users would require many many instances of Watson running, so 10 racks of servers per instance doesn't sound feasible.

While I agree with this interpretation, here's an explicit quote from the OP:

"Even though most of the computations occur at the data center, a Watson smartphone application would still consume too much power for it to be practical today."

Its called lousy writing.

They need to optimize Watson server side for it to become commercially.

p.s.: I for one welcome our new Blue Overlord.

Perhaps they are referring to speech recognition, which would either consume a lot of bandwidth being sent over the wire as audio or consume a lot of power to be processed on-device.

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