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AMD Hopes to Bring Gaming to the Cloud with "Fusion Render Cloud" Supercomputer

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After the thrashing Intel doled out with its Core 2 and now Core i7 platforms, one might accuse AMD of having its head in the clouds for the past couple of years. Now AMD really is looking to the cloud, but not the way you probably imagined. The struggling chip maker announced at CES a plan to shake up the "deployment, development, and delivery of HD content" by building a massively-parallel supercomputer that will give home to the "AMD Fusion Render Cloud."

"Seven out of 10 of the world’s fastest machines, including the fastest two computers on the planet, are powered by AMD hardware,” said Dirk Meyer, AMD President and CEO. "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."

AMD says its scalable graphics supercomputer will make it possible for content providers to deliver videogames, computer apps, and any other graphically intensive application through the Cloud to mobile devices with a web browser, and without sucking the battery life out of the units since both the movie and gaming chores will be rendered server-side.

Looking at the hardware, AMD says its Fusion Render Cloud will include AMD parts (duh) like the newly minted Phenom II processors, AMD 790 chipsets, and ATI Radeon 4870 GPUs.

Do you see this as being a game changer for AMD, or game over for a company with enough on its plate already? Hit the jump and sound off!

COMMENTS:3
COMMENTS
avatarNot with people still using

Not with people still using dialup and Slow connections. I doubt this will take hold until the ISP's of the USA learn to get there act together and quit with the bandwidth limitations and actually put out an internet connection that is on par with that of Japan.

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avatarAgreed. And any single

Agreed. And any single player games will require a fast Internet connection! Not counting games that require updating immediately after install. :p Actually, turn-based games could work. Hmm, maybe there are applications for this idea. Might be possible for light-weight 2-d games.

Maybe AMD knows something we don't. In any case, if this idea starts heading south, they can always just sell the system. Somebody will want it.

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avatarI want it! I think it can do

I want it!

I think it can do more than 2d games, I would expect it to give last year's 3d games to netbooks with a fast internet conection.

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