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