Given all of the advantages of host rendering compared to client rendering, why are most other remote image protocols using client rendering?
The primary reason is that host rendering requires compression of the host-rendered image before transmitting it over the network. Doing this in software on the host computer either requires a significant amount of computation on the host computer or a significant amount of bandwidth on the network if limited compression is used. Until the recent introduction of multi-core CPUs with multimedia instruction extensions, this tradeoff was generally unacceptable. With today’s CPUs, the PCoIP Software Server can now provide an exceptional user experience for all but the most demanding workstation applications while making efficient use of the available network bandwidth. However, the CPU resources required for the PCoIP Software Server will limit the number of virtual machines that can be consolidated on a single server. By offloading this computation load to a PCoIP Hardware Host, significantly more users can be supported from one server, thus reducing cost, space, and power consumption in
