The issue focused on software systems with automated deployment processes that identify machines as servers or appliances and deploy software applications from those servers. IBM identified hardware components such as GPUs, CPUs and disks as devices that could be problematic for enterprise computing systems because they use commodity processors and disk drives.

IBM researchers conducted simulations of computers operating under various scenarios in which machine compute engines would handle computation tasks without CPU hardware support. Computers running Intel Xeon CPUs had higher computational efficiency than PCs running NVIDIA GPUs and laptops running IBM PowerPC