Today during an Industry Insider Series keynote at CES in Las Vegas, AMD CEO Dirk Meyer and OTOY CEO Jules Urbach announced that AMD has been working on what it’s calling the world’s “fastest supercomputer ever”, designed “to break the one petaFLOPS barrier and to process a million compute threads across more than 1000 graphics processors”.
The supercomputer, dubbed the “Fusion Render Cloud”, will run OTOY’s graphics rendering software, which as we reported last July, is intended to deliver high-end 3D graphics through the cloud by preprocessing them on servers before delivering them over the web to thin devices.
Urbach considers this supercomputer a big step in delivering on OTOY’s promise, which requires large-scale computational power to service the processing needs of many end users who rely on central computing in lieu of graphics cards in their own devices. He says that 10% of the computer has already been built and that AMD plans to have it ready for beta testing by mid-2009. While he anticipates that many more supercomputers will be needed to scale OTOY’s technology globally (this supercomputer is “just a sliver of a percent of what you need”), AMD has committed to improving this first supercomputer over time with its latest hardware. It’s intended to support up to 1 million users.
AMD says that it’s already responsible for seven of the world’s ten fastest computers, including the first and second fastest. This supercomputer, which is being built in Burbank, California, will presumably give AMD all three top spots.
Even with today’s announcement, it is yet to be seen whether AMD’s hardware can get OTOY’s server-side rendering to scale effectively, let alone work over the broadband connections available to most end users. We also have yet to hear more about Liveplace’s virtual world, which is being powered by OTOY.
This technology holds great potential for future videogame consoles. Imagine a console that has only a hardrive and ram but is able to process photo realistic images from the cloud. I can’t wait to see the first demo of this!
Then what happens when there’s a problem at the server side or that you are at a slightly remote location which do not support broadband connection?
It would only be practical at certain places like gaming arcades and such.
Yes. Why isnt everyone else asking that question. Plus all the security measures…
You do the same thing as you would do with any other website… you wait. Most of the world’s real computing is done on the most-of-the-time-on and some-of-the-time-off Internet.
The Otoy system is supposed to be scalable all the way down to older, slower devices, mobile devices etc. and with a cloud system there would always be a backup, as they state in the article, they would make more than one… then the load could be distributed if there is a problem with one server… if that’s what you want to call one of the most powerful computers on Earth…
Current GPUs are already capable of producing near -cinematic quality video and costs less then $200. Why will somebody need this “cloud”? Will go straight to deadpool, imo.
You must not understand the processing level involved in actually creating a complex environment in real-time.
An individual’s current CPUs/GPUs/bandwidth doesn’t even scratch the surface, unless you’re confusing static content (watching a Blu-ray disc) and extremely simplistic data like a video game/MMO server.
Server-side/cloud computing is absolutely the future of a lot of consumer-based software because it’ll always be thousands of steps ahead of what individual computers can do on their own.
Agreed me too. We need this and want this bad.
True. AMD is turning on the heat for Intel in the processor market and is a good sign. Gaming as Kevin said has immense potential, but apart from that research can be given a new lease of life with such powerful systems, making it more worthwhile and effective.
This is extremely ambitious. I just don’t see how they can make this fast given todays crappy broadband speed. Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong though. Also, in 5 years(hopefully if Intel doesn’t drop the ball again), everyone should have powerful video cards finally integrated into their pcs and laptops. Right now(mostly because of intel), many people have shi**y video cards. This has kept PC dev stuck in the year 2000. Rather sad and pathetic.
The future is not wired broadband but wireless satelite connected broadband, which can be used anywhere at fiber-optic speeds (eventually). As such, I see this as having great potential in a number of fields!
Jon
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I’m skeptical about this because of the greedy ISPs’ who overcharge and under deliver on their broadband service. Bandwidth caps anyone…
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This is one of the most retarded concept I have heard in a while.
The unicast model for video isn’t a profitable one. Ask Google if they are profitable with youtube. It is simply that bandwidth is the majority of the cost.
Now, they are trying to add the cost of cluster of GPUs into the formula and expect to be profitable? Integrating a small GPU into every handheld is so much cheaper than remote rendering then delivered using expensive bandwidth in unicast mode.
You’re simply another person who doesn’t understand the concept of this. Try to realize the difference between centralized real-time content and localized real-time content. Re-read how it works until you get it.
Not only does this give incredible scale and power, it can do so on one’s comparatively crappy computer, even in the palm of one’s hand.
As far as YouTube, Google couldn’t ask for more. Just watch in the next few years. Not only will it become very profitable as Google reduces bandwidth costs and is finally now doing the obvious (having video sponsors in search results), but YT will continue to grow and be the go-to place for all things TV/Video as TV sets are fully connected to the web. Beyond that, it’s one of the #1 vehicles for influencing people and getting the word out about something; that’s a hell of a lot of power that Google has, maybe of the best investment they’ve ever made.
Well said! And I have to agree with you about YouTube–it will prove to be a great investment. It has become the mecca for all forms of media and all cultures around the globe. Another prediction for the future of YouTube… it will be the centerpiece for the fruition of global/ubiquitous and immersive telepresence, as soon as the needed technology is available and cheap enough.
Besides to calculate PI, analyze data from LHC and SETI, what other uses are there for Supercomputer?
really really sweet games.
games – the driving force behind all advances in technology.
even the most popular games have been used to describe porn as the driving force behind technology.
On the side note, a 1000 node cluster with Radeon HD4870×2s will have a “theoretical” peak FLOP performance of 1PetaFlop. That theoretical peak can’t be sustained. Look at the performance of folding at home GPU clients, AMD’s GPGPU performance is abysmal.
This is nothing but a publicity stunt. You want true hybrid compute cluster? Look into IBM’s roadrunner architecture with 8 SPF cell processors with Opteron 2200 series CPUs. Cell scales a lot better than current GPUs for GPGPU usage
Your very right. The Cell BE by IBM is truly a leap forward in CPU structure capability. It is generations ahead of any x86 based chip. The Cell BE is a much better solution in a world of continuously increasing media rich environments. I just wish IBM provided a CELL based desktop system.
OTOY’s a giant vaporware scam. Remember how that video they were showing off was completely fake and was a rendering from some guy’s demo reel?!
I see where people might be coming from about but I see this is a very strong leap forward. Think about it.. with obama coming into the presidency and all the talk of conservation coming from his administration. It will be much like a power company as in its very inefficiency to produce power from a gas generator at each person’s home. Kinda like the same concept with this.. all the horse power in one place with all the energy usage centered in a single area thus cutting back on energy usage in general.. Perhaps a step towards conservation?
Welcome to the Brave New World where PCs will be forbidden and all your data could only be stored on the net.
Techcrunch is really falling for one big scam here – the mother of all BS stories perhaps. Please, Mike, hear us out.
Take a *niche* MMO like Eve Online with its 45,000 concurrent users. To render this locally with today’s graphics would take 45,000 graphics cards put together. To render it with the movie-quality CGI they claim, would take an unimaginable number of graphics processors put together – Pixar have gigancic servers farms and yet do not even render in real time for *one* monitor.
Even if they managed to get their hands on a chip that’s from the future (terminator-style perhaps?), they still would need to have one per concurrent user and the energy required to run the farm would be incredible – beyond the one of a small city. You’d need your own coal plant.
Finally, there’s the bandwidth issue in unicast. While doable, the cost to operate this would be very high.
Put everything together, and add the myriads of issues MMO currently have (seems that Warcrafts can’t even support more than a few thousand users per shards as it is), and you have the bottom line: this is vaporware.
Either you fell for the BS story of the century or you have an interest in maintaining it. Very strange!
Wow the vast majority of comments here are astroturfing. Simply amazing.
Not only games, but 3d modelling stuff and very complex algorithms will be easier to tackle.. problems like TSP which are unsolvable with the present supercomputers may become solvable…