Netbooks could drive production of even crazily cheaper, lighter-weight computers. "If everything you're doing is online, then the netbook becomes a screen with a radio chip. So why do you need a motherboard?" OLPC designer Mary Lou Jepsen says. "Especially if you want the batteries to last. Why not just make it a screen and a really cheap $2 to $5 radio chip?" The cloud is also probably going to get powerful in ways that now seem like fantasy. AMD is working on an experimental 3-D graphics server farm that would run high-end videogames, squirting a stream out to portable devices so you could play even the most outrageously lush games without a fancy onboard processor. Patrick Moorehead, AMD's vice president of marketing, recalls that in 2007 gamers had to buy special powerful desktop machines loaded with RAM and $600 graphics cards to play Crysis: "Now imagine you've got servers running Crysis and streaming it to an iPhone or a netbook, sending just the vectors that let you navigate the game."

awwwwww yea. As someone who built a new computer for Crysis (<3 my baby q6600, 2x8800 512mb gt, 4gb ram, 680i sli board) this is exciting potential. i just can't figure out how it would work, we complain at the tiniest bit of lag for dota still, or other games. the quality and speed of internet would really have to improve dramatically for this to run seamlessly... so developing the technology alone (unless it was being used semi-locally on a giga ethernet lan party or gaming cafe) won't cut it... but it's still exciting that in the future high end graphics could come to more portable stuff.

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/17-03/mf_netbooks?current...