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Whipsaw-designed Pano Device (computerless computer) is smaller, greener, and award-winning

By Rain Noe - October 7, 2010

in Tech | Object Culture

The Pano Device is like a computer with nothing inside it. You plug your monitor, keyboard and mouse into the back, but it contains no CPU, no memory, and no software; all of that stuff resides on a Pano Manager server, which hosts the OS and virtualizes it to the Pano Device.

So what's inside the thing? Damned if I know, I think if you dropped it and it shattered there'd be little leprechaun bodies all over your floor. But the bottom line is this two-inch tall device is projected to cut business computing costs by 70%; "compared to a PC it consumes 3% of the energy, uses 4% of the material to make it, and is one hundred times smaller."

Designed by ID consultancy Whipsaw, the Pano Device has won a 2010 Green Good Design Award, which is conferred by the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies. (Sadly, the Good Design website was not working properly at press time so no direct link is available.)

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James bonney

11 years ago

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What is the price?
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Erik

14 years ago

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A server farm is far more efficient than thousands of individual computers. The concept is much like a bus, sure a bus uses more fuel than a car, but it doesn't use twenty times as much even though it may be carrying the same number of people as twenty cars. Look at CPU utilization on your computer, it's probably over 90% idle meaning your computer is spending most of it's time doing nothing ,but it's still using electricity.
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Nate

14 years ago

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True zero client (PCoIP). If anyone should be winning awards it's Teradici...likely their hardware anyway =\
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shane

14 years ago

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isn't this cloud computing?. i fail to see how running every computer task from a distant server is a greener solution than what we currently have. doesn't this use more energy in total due to the distances involved and the energy consumption of the massive server rooms needed to host such services? it relocated the power consumption out of mind. same senario as electric cars.
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k

14 years ago

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read their site and don't really understand why this is winning an award. thin clients have been around for eons and would be this small if they didn't support as much input/output.

e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray
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KGB

14 years ago

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Does the Server run on butterflies?
I mean....those green numbers are great, but do they include the energy required to run the constantly-on server facility, requiring electricity, climate control, support staff, etc...?

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Gabriel Amadeus

14 years ago

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"Sadly, the Good Design website was not working properly..."

Heehee!
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