Play Crysis on Your Cellphone; Thank AMD

What kind of sumpercomputer can pre-render HD content, temporarily store it in a virtual cloud, and then stream it across the Internet to numerous portable devices? Why, AMD's upcoming Fusion Render Cloud, of course!

Sounds too good to be true? You bet it does, yet that is exactly what AMD promised today at CES 2009. Basically, the massively parallel supercomputer will enable content providers to deliver video games, PC applications and other graphically-intensive applications through the Internet. This means the calculating beast will bring HD media to laptops, smartphones and other devices through server-side rendering. Once rendered, the machine throws the "visually rich" content into a compute cloud (aka HD Cloud Computing), compresses it, and streams it real-time over wireless and broadband connections to devices that can't otherwise handle the rendering. Woof.

“AMD has a long track record in the supercomputing world. Seven out of 10 of the world’s fastest machines, including the fastest two computers on the planet, are powered by AMD hardware,” said Meyer. “Today, AMD is pleased to announce a new kind of supercomputer unlike any other ever built. It is being designed to break the one petaFLOPS barrier, and to process a million compute threads across more than 1,000 graphics processors. We anticipate it to be the fastest graphics supercomputer ever. And it will be powered by OTOY’s software for a singular purpose: to make HD cloud computing a reality. We plan to have this system ready by the second half of 2009.”

So what's under the hood of this beast? According to the company, the AMD Fusion Render Cloud will include AMD Phenom II processors, AMD 790 chipsets, and ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphic processors. OTOY throws in its innovative software, taking full advantage of AMD's box of goods that together will make streaming HD possible.

“By fusing industry-leading CPU technology with computationally dense, massively parallel graphics processors, the AMD Fusion Render Cloud can rival the world’s most powerful industrial computing devices, but require just a fraction of the floor space, power envelope and cost associated with many of today’s leading supercomputers,” said Jules Urbach, Chief Executive Officer, OTOY. “Combined with the power of OTOY’s revolutionary and flexible software platform, the AMD Fusion Render Cloud can transform the entertainment industry and remove the technical barriers between consumers and first-rate content experiences.”

According to the company, AMD plans to provide the hardware and engineering resources for the AMD Fusion Render Cloud, with OTOY providing technical software development and a middleware layer.