1 PC, Concurrent Multiusers?

[arter97]

Previously, it was cheaper to just buy a few modestly spec’ed PCs instead of getting a high core-count PC and setting up multiusers environment.

 

But now with enormous multicore CPUs being affordable, we thought it makes more sense than ever for a single PC to serve multiple users at the same time.

We can plug in multiple monitors, keyboards and mice and just use.

 

Me and my fellow teammates think this is the future, and we wanted to make this concept easily accessible to everyone.

 

 

I want to hear what you all think of this.

While there are many guides on how to set this up, almost all of those are overwhelmingly complicated - matching hardware spec and using advanced Linux techniques.

As a person who was interested in this tech years before 6 cores, 8 cores CPUs for mainline was a thing,

I can comfortably say that UX was/is horrible.

 

We had to use multiple graphics cards since QEMU’s integrated graphics stack is not performant,

and USB devices was a nightmare, especially when used headlessly.

 

We wanted to avoid all of these major issues and allow non-techies to use this advanced tech as well.

 

People can just avoid using these type of solutions and get cheap alternatives such as Raspberry Pi and Chromebook.

But still, there are nothing like running a full and proper desktop OS such as Windows, and that’s what we’re targeting at.

Using multi-session RDP is also not comparable, imo, as that still needs some kind of a client device to remotely login.

 

I know many people would be wondering how gaming will be handled.

While the majority of people here would be gamers, we’re currently targeting value over performance - people who’re fine with IGP-level performance.

This mean that we want to enable multiple OSes to use a single graphics card.

This needs a virtualized graphics device to be passed to the OS, which in term, means worsened graphics performance.

We have been able to achieve 1080p60-ish performance using a single RX460 with 4 concurrent users, while the stock graphics driver in QEMU - QXL doesn’t even come close.

We want to wait until SR-IOV powered graphics cards to be a thing before experimenting with gaming.

 

I’m sorry if this sounds way too much like an advertisement, but I’m genuinely curious.

What do you think? We think this is the future.

 

If there was a simple and elegant solution to this concept, we think the entire world can save some serious amount of resources(hardware, power, wastes, etc).

[Mira Yurizaki]

16 minutes ago, arter97 said:

We have been able to achieve 1080p60-ish performance using a single RX460 with 4 concurrent users, while the stock graphics driver in QEMU - QXL doesn’t even come close.

Nitpick: this statement means little to me if no other details are provided. As far as I know, the RX 460 is good for 1080p 60FPS on a single user for most games today on high-ish settings.

[NumLock21]

Dual socket motherboards and processors themselves are not cheap. And when the system breaks down, everyone suffers. This also takes away the p in pc. Personal Computer.

[arter97]

15 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Nitpick: this statement means little to me if no other details are provided. As far as I know, the RX 460 is good for 1080p 60FPS on a single user for most games today on high-ish settings.

It's provided. People who've used virtualized graphics stack such as QEMU's QXL will understand what that means.

That sentence is not for gaming context at all.

QXL is barely usable.

[arter97]

9 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

Dual socket motherboards and processors themselves are not cheap. And when the system breaks down, everyone suffers. This also takes away the p in pc. Personal Computer.

Xeon or other workstation CPUs are definitely not what we're targeting.

Ryzen and possibly cheaper mainline Intel CPUs are.

 

I think that most people would be willing to take the price benefit despite of that possible downtime increase,

as the computer hardware is getting more stable and stable.

[vanished]

41 minutes ago, arter97 said:

Xeon or other workstation CPUs are definitely not what we're targeting.

Ryzen and possibly cheaper mainline Intel CPUs are.

 

I think that most people would be willing to take the price benefit despite of that possible downtime increase,

as the computer hardware is getting more stable and stable.

It's an interesting idea for sure.  Certainly you'll pay more for a 1800X or 1950X than you would for a CPU that would satisfy most people, but you'll save not needing an additional copy of windows, an additional PSU, additional drives, additional case to put it all in, etc. and I think you are probably right about this being cheaper, especially as you increase the number of individual machines this replaces.