iPhone - Mac shared processing

[Patrick J]

It occurred to me as I was importing thousands of photos off my iPhone that it'd be great to share the processing between the iPhone and Mac- surely this would speed up the operation immensely? Connected with a USB cable power wouldn't a problem, and I'm sure the A7 could take a substantial amount of the load off of the Mac

As Apple keep increasing the power of the iOS devices, how long before this becomes a reality?

 

[maflynn]

The A7 is a mobile processor and not in the same league as Intel's mobile/desktop. There's really not too much that could be achieved, and the overhead needed to manage such tasks may remove any possible (though remote) savings.

I have a 2010 13" MBP that my wife uses, and before handing that off to her, I used and found it quite sufficient to edit photos, run photoshop (nothing major) and do other image processing. If a 3 year old computer is able to be efficient with image editing, I'm rather doubtful that we need to borrow CPU cycles on an iPhone to make the current generation of computers even faster, i.e., Haswell chipsets are freaking fast.

 

[Patrick J]

I have a 2009 13" MBP. This is a C2D 2.26 Ghz chip.

It gets pretty bogged down by iPhoto.

I expect modern chips have surplus power for these kind of tasks.

 

[old-wiz]

I think the usb 2 connection would really slow things down.

There have been setups where two computers share the computing, but it requires specialized software to control it.

I doubt the IOS kernel has enough flexibility to handle shared processing.