RSSAMD to develop a cloud supercomputer for graphics rendering
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published January 8, 2009, 11:31 PM
The system that could render the next 3D game for cell phones and handsets may not even reside on those devices, if AMD has its way.
Easily AMD's most important announcement from a corporate survival standpoint was its Phenom II X4 platform, which could earn the company some bragging rights in the important enthusiast market. But AMD also needed a psychological boost, something which could represent the company's goals equally among everyone, not just system builders.
That's what CEO Dirk Meyer delivered today at CES 2009. This afternoon, he told attendees his company plans to build a new petaflop barrier-breaking supercomputer that could land it among six other AMD CPU-based clusters in the world's Top 10. But rather than an academic experiment, for the first time, AMD sees this as a revenue opportunity: It wants to use this supercomputer as a cloud computing cluster, currently branded "Fusion Render," with the "Fusion" part representing AMD's experiment in integrating task-intensive CPUs with mathematical heavyweight graphics processors.
AMD is quite literally suggesting that film animation developers, PC game developers, and cell phone game developers enable this supercomputer cluster as a "server-side HD cloud rendering" platform. That's right, the company is suggesting that its cloud could pre-render graphics that a cell phone's processor isn't capable of rendering in real-time, and beam it to its user faster than its native processor would normally work.
Think of this cloud as comprised of an enthusiast gaming graphics platform, multiplied by a few thousand -- the exact number isn't known, though the CPU count will likely be a power of 2, and the GPU count may match. The CPUs will be branded with Phenom II, not Opteron -- the typical brand used in supercomputers. And the GPUs will be ATI Radeon HD 4870s.
| In this demonstration from technology provider OTOY, a Transformers-like video is rendered in real-time, with the view of the scene being changed "live" by a browser user who is downloading the results. |
Maybe the hardware to pull this off theoretically exists, but does the software? Quite possibly yes: AMD is partnering with Hollywood high-end graphics developer OTOY, which has agreed to deploy its rendering software in AMD's cloud. The company hopes to deploy the Fusion Render Cloud in the second half of the year, with the big supercomputer conference being semi-annual, November will likely be the soonest month we see results.
So...now developers are to be writing massively parallel development code for anything but massively parallel platforms?
Exactly how does this benefit the PC platform?
But we should use it to beam 'pre-rendered' drawing to cell phones...and just what would consitute 'pre-rendered' graphics? Ads??? And pre-rendered graphics add just what to a dynamic envirnment - or do they simply mean the changing 'canned' static graphics. Wow(sic)! Thanks guys!
There is going to need to be quite a bit more thought put into this to make it worthwhile.
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Good news. Will be interesting to watch this develop.
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