I noticed that some Thin clients these days have i5’s and i7’s, and also have a significant amount of RAM.
I haven’t used them in a while, but I thought their purpose was just to render pixels that were sent over a network.
Given the high specs, I assume that some processing can be offloaded onto the client. Are they running a full OS? Are they displaying a remote OS and running certain apps locally?
I guess my question is – what architecture/products can be employed to utilise the processing power of these Thin clients? And importantly, how does it differ to just having a normal PC?
P.S. I’d like to keep the question hardware agnostic, but the hardware that prompted me to ask this question was the Dell Wyse 7040
Answer
Thin Clients aren’t always used for only RDP/Citrix. They can also be used as kiosk terminals for browsing, or PoS systems. Or even local browsing by the user, instead of doing it in RDP.
It works rather nice, since they have a write filter (or PXEboot+ramdisk) that reverts everything back to normal after a restart.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Fidel , Answer Author : pauska
