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AMD Plans 1,000-GPU Supercomputer For Games, Cloud
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Jan 09, 2009 10:08 PM
from the still-won't-run-crysis dept.
from the still-won't-run-crysis dept.
arcticstoat writes "AMD is planning to use over 1,000 Radeon HD 4870 GPUs to create a supercomputer capable of processing one petaflop, which the company says will make 'cloud' computing a reality. When it's built later this year, the Fusion Render Cloud will be available as an online powerhorse for a variety of people, from gamers to 3D animators. The company claims that it could 'deliver video games, PC applications and other graphically-intensive applications through the Internet "cloud" to virtually any type of mobile device with a web browser.' The idea is that the Fusion Render Cloud will do all the hard work, so all you need is a machine capable of playing back the results, saving battery life and the need for ever greater processing power. AMD also says that the supercomputer will 'enable remote real-time rendering of film and visual effects graphics on an unprecedented scale.' Meanwhile, game developers would be able to use the supercomputer to quickly develop games, and also 'serve up virtual world games with unlimited photo-realistic detail.' The supercomputer will be powered by OTOY software, which allows you to render 3D visuals in your browser via streaming, compressed online data."
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Oh Yeah? Well..... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
2000 Intel GPUs?? Well, that's like a Radeon 3650, right?
Uhm, bandwidth? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if the "work" is offloaded to the cloud won't you still need an assload of bandwidth on said devices in order to actually amount to anything? It's not like you're going to get pci-express bandwidth capabilities over dsl or cable internet connection.
Re:Uhm, bandwidth? (Score:5, Insightful)
We can already stream DVD-quality movies encoded at 1 mbps or so, well within the current consumer "broadband" offerings. I'd assume that would be in the target range.
But even if you wanted for some reason to go uncompressed, then 8-bit 800x600 at 25 fps would still be less than 100 mbps, not totally unreasonable.
I would imagine the latency would be a much bigger problem than bandwidth. If you ever used VNC you probably know what I mean.
Parent
Re:Uhm, bandwidth? (Score:5, Informative)
We can already stream DVD-quality movies encoded at 1 mbps or so, well within the current consumer "broadband" offerings.
No, we can't. Of course, if you've been fooled into thinking that scene crap is "DVD quality", then perhaps this holds true. Otherwise, you would realize that not even H.264 can deliver DVD quality video (720x480, no artifacts) in less than 1 Mbps.
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Videphile-quality cables. (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, you can. You need to use the correct ethernet cables with high-level tin alloy shielding and vibration elimination: http://www.usa.denon.com/ProductDetails/3429.asp [denon.com]
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
You're sure that's not a Monster Cable rebrand?
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Holy fsck. $500 for a 5 foot long ETHERNET CABLE!?!!? For the "serious audiophile"?!?!?
(Um, hello? It's DIGITAL?!?!)
Goes to show, there really IS a sucker born every minute, but at these prices, they'd make out like bandits if they only made 1 sale/week...
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Ya, no shit. And to think I might have chose Denon when making my audio receiver purchase.
Sony is evil in many ways, but at least they offer a good receiver for the money. Their STRDG820 Model goes for $399, and you still save $100 over that damn Denon cable!
What's next? Acoustical aerosol spray that enhances audio, video, and smells like a new movie theater?
Re: (Score:2)
Bandwidth. That precious commodity.
Obviously, they're going off one or more of these assumptions/instances :
1) They have designed one hell of a compression algorithm. The OTOY site has between fuck-all and nothing on it, and the domain is relatively new (which doesn't say much - if some bright spark at AMD developed a mean compression algorithm that isn't overwhelmingly intensive, and s/he split off, then it would be new).
2) Mobile bandwidth will be making a fantastic leap at rough
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The kinds of data that they're implying that this "Cloud" (not an original name - the Supercomputing Conference has had "Cloud Computing" for several years, basically a pool/grid of various institutions and/or sponsors who contribute compute, storage, etc. to the conference participants) will handle does not lend itself
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The fact that this one is specifically targeted towards rendering graphics doesn't make it any conceptually unique. And just like everyone has been rabbiting along about the wonders of grid computing (and yet there are so many varying alliances right now that I don't think we'll see much progress for a while; companies d
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
(720x480, no artifacts)
Are you blind? DVD is full of artefacts, its mpeg, its ass.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
One thing that is really cool about this technology is that it has the potential to eliminate cheating in games such as first person shooters. A lot of the cheating in the past is because the game client running on a user's
No, latency (Score:4, Insightful)
The bandwidth is only a problem until we build bigger tubes. As much as we all like to bitch about internet here in the US, we're at least capable of increasing the bandwidth quite well. The real problem is dealing with the latency. With enough time and money we could easily push as much data as we could possibly want, but we can only push it so fast.
For some games it probably won't matter, but who'd want to use it for an FPS where regardless of how detailed your graphics are, even a tenth of a second lag is the difference between who lives and who dies? Until we can get around those limitations, I don't foresee the traditional setup changing much.
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Re: (Score:2)
For some games it probably won't matter, but who'd want to use it for an FPS where regardless of how detailed your graphics are, even a tenth of a second lag is the difference between who lives and who dies?
I might just be talking out of my ass here, but... If latency is your only bottleneck, and you have plenty of bandwidth and CPU on the server, wouldn't it be possible to deliver as many renderings as there are possible inputs, and only use whichever one corresponds to what the player actually does?
A simple example would be a game where, at any moment, the player could be moving up, down, left, or right. The server could generate four different views, one for each possible input. All four are delivered to th
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While I agree that with regards to gaming they are probably blowing smoke, where I can see this thing being a boon is in the field of amateur film making. Imagine the kind of effects all those future film makers could create with access to that kind of rendering power. If the rental price is reasonable then I could see this possibly doing for films what digital gear has done for musicians. That is of course give the power to the creators instead of the middle men.
I would love to see what kinds of films w
Re:No, latency (Score:4, Interesting)
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While I agree that this is odd with games, I definitely see the potential for 3d animators. It takes my home computers (note the plural) hours/days to render complex scenes, depending on the length of the scene. The advantage in computing power would greatly outweigh the bandwidth cost here, especially if you could just upload the job and wait for the result (instead of sending each frame to be rendered).
But I would imagine it would not take many people to bog this down.
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Even if the "work" is offloaded to the cloud won't you still need an assload of bandwidth on said devices in order to actually amount to anything? It's not like you're going to get pci-express bandwidth capabilities over dsl or cable internet connection.
There are services that have low demands on the client and high demands on the server. For example, a game with a huge player population (like several hundred thousand). I think that Second Life or Eve Online would be examples of such games. The graphics isn't that demanding on older PCs and they have a huge player population. So no, you wouldn't need to have a huge amount of bandwidth, but it's not going to be state of the art graphics.
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You don't need PCI-e bandwidth. All you are doing is transporting 2-dimensional video. We are already very good at doing that over moderate bandwidth connections.
1-2 Mbps will do standard definition video comfortably well.
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You think this is so you don't have to buy a new graphics card? The only reason companies would go for this is because it changes their games from a product to a service, so piracy goes away. Next-gen DRM, if you will (next-gen doesn't have to be worse, however; I avoid buying games due to how invasive the DRM is and know plenty of people who do the same, so the next generation of the stuff damn well better address that).
If it's implemented correctly it would still offer us advantages - play from any comp
Good luck (Score:5, Insightful)
"VNCing" games through the Internet and possibly a wireless network, and getting a decent enough latency and enough throughoutput to get a good image quality/FPS? Good luck with that, not saying it won't work, but if it does work satisfyingly and reliably it'll be an impressive feat.
Well I know StreamMyGame [streammygame.com] does it, but it's meant to be used locally, not over the internet + WiFi, right?
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WiFi itself is enough to completely kill a gaming session. When I'm at home on my laptop, I like to remotely login to my desktop. Allows me the horse power of my desktop, along with access to all the files (read: pr0n).
Works flawlessly really, but the difference between ethernet and wifi is perceptible. But as soon you try gaming over it, it becomes unusable (for any action game at least). Even simple games like kasteroids or kbounce are not worth using (I get routine 1 second freezes). On the other hand, d
Re: (Score:2)
Replying to myself. The end of my post got truncated by html parser thingy. Slashdot has to be the bulletin board where you need to write < to get a < sign..
The end of the post should have:
< 1ms). I assume it must be from packet loss, but it very well might be a bandwidth issue too.
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Sure...it would need the bandwidth of receiving fullscreen video/audio.
Latency wise, some game may be more suitable than the others. For example, RTS game like Warcraft III - where the action are carried out ONLY after the command is synced to each other players, and is lagged anyway.
Though I think it's has much more value in doing pre-rendering, animation rendering, etc. AMD just rents the CPU hour for you to get your job done.
Only 1.000? (Score:4, Interesting)
Folding@home is at 1.007 PFLOPS of just ATI GPUs :)
(which is an entirely different sort of "computer", but still)
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Cloud?! TWO IN ONE DAY? (Score:3, Funny)
Attention, AMD Marketroids: Please kill yourselves. Now. Do it now.
*blink*
Yes. All of you.
What about latency in gaming? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What about latency in gaming? (Score:4, Insightful)
Having a cloud in your own house would be nice, so everyone could share computing power across multiple computers.
I, for one, do not want my computing power on lease.
Parent
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Maybe it could just bake occlusion maps and such and stream that out to you. That stuff can tolerate a little lag once in a while (things will just look weird, or fall back on something less realistic), requires a whole lotta processing per scene, and in say a mmorpg type environment, it only has to be done once for everybody.
online powerhorse? (Score:5, Funny)
the Fusion Render Cloud will be available as an online powerhorse
AMD also described NVIDIA's Quadroplex as more of an online My Little Pony.
How will this save money? (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead of buying a $400 video card, now you're paying AMD to buy that video card for you, paying them for the management of that card, and paying your ISP for the bandwidth. The only possible way this works is if you only use your card 10% of the time, then AMD can utilize it at 100%, selling you just one-tenth the total.
Of course, that's great for gamers, who will sporadically play throughout the day, but awful for movie studios who could probably keep a render farm at 100% anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Movie-grade CG tends to rendered via raytracing, which, AFAIK, is an algorithm that is more suited to be run on a general-purpose CPU, instead of a GPU.
I'm sure part of the reason that nVIDIA and ATI have been working to develop alternative applications of their GPU technology is that their GPUs could potentially become unnecessary to gamers, should CPUs ever reach the speed where real-time raytracing is practical.
One Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
I know kung-fu. (Score:2, Funny)
AMD also says that the supercomputer will 'enable remote real-time rendering of film and visual effects graphics on an unprecedented scale.' Meanwhile, game developers would be able to use the supercomputer to quickly develop games, and also 'serve up virtual world games with unlimited photo-realistic detail.'
they have this in the future. don't they call it the matrix?
I look forward to (Score:5, Insightful)
Contest, the rematch... (Score:3, Funny)
A comment from the story earlier today about nVidia's new 2-teraflop multicore card:
Yet again, Nvidia showed ATI that it, indeed, has the biggest penis.
Hah! HAH! While nVidia dicks around with expansion cards measured in mere teraflops, AMD is building a SUPERCOMPUTER. That's a /peta/flop, nVidia! If you don't know what that is, here's a hint: take your teraflop. Then add three zeros to the end. BAM!
AMD's penis is now 500 times larger than nVidia's. It's math.
Re:Contest, the rematch... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nvidia's GTX 295 was around 1.7 teraflops I believe, while the (similarly priced) 4870X2 is 2.4. The 'mere' 295 supposedly beats the 4870X2 by 15% average.
The difference is? Nvidia always has pretty good drivers. ATI struggles to allow games to take >50% advantage of even the lowly 3870 (as measured by the card's own performance counters)...let alone a 2.4 tflop card...let alone a massive array of 4870s.
Plus, wouldn't a 1000 GPU 4870 cloud...only allow some 1000 users some fractional percentage of one 4870 capped by latency and other overhead?
Or...are we talking about providing a larger number of mobile devices the equivalent capabilities and speed of 1999's Geforce 256?
Either way...I don't think it'll catch on, and will be a huge money sink for AMD when it needs to be fixing its processor and video card issues for the average, real consumers who are losing faith in AMD's ability to provide reasonable and usefully competitive products.
Parent
Revival of the video-arcade (Score:2)
Plus, wouldn't a 1000 GPU 4870 cloud...only allow some 1000 users some fractional percentage of one 4870 capped by latency and other overhead?
Earlier in this thread, people were talking about the latency over the general IPv4 internet - but suppose that AMD/ATI could get the price on this thing down to $20,000 or $10,000 - to the point that an entrepreneur could purchase one of these boxes, and a gigabit [or maybe even 10-gigabit] ethernet switch, and some ethernet cabling, and some base stations [with v
Ah, the Big Iron versus micros war again.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Figures. See, most people thought that war had been won long ago. Perhaps it was, but now the Big Iron camp has a new ally: Big Software, who REALLY wants to do away with one-time licenses and purchases and substitute the far more lucrative "Web apps" and the subscription licensing and fees that paradigm will allow. They want to re-brand software as "content" and they want consumers to willingly buy into that. Their latest sneaky flanking maneuver is what you know as Web apps, but the objective is the same.
If you say yes to either one, centralized computing or software subscriptions, you're actually saying yes to BOTH.
Nancy Reagan had the better advice: Just Say No... to both.
Bullshit Stack Overflow (Score:5, Insightful)
"serve up virtual world games with unlimited photo-realistic detail."
Considering that CGI effects in movie houses have only started approaching effects indistinguishable from reality within the last five or so years this spikes my bullshit meter pretty high.
Factor in Weta/IL&M and the rest are using huge render farms for an extremely non-realtime render process and my meter explodes.
Even if I take the claim at face value and postulate that it is possible to do this then I am forced to wonder about how many concurrent, real-time, 100% realistic scenes it can process at once.
Sounds like the marketing department wet their pants a bit early on this one.
Practical benifits (Score:2, Interesting)
The 1970s? Did I step into a time machine? (Score:3, Insightful)
I sit down at my dumb terminal, I log in, and now I have access to a central supercomputer (via the network) that does all the processing.
This AMD idea sounds like something from the 1970s.
Latency? (Score:5, Insightful)
And I doubt that streaming a 3d rendering will really save much battery either considering all the network activity.
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Re: (Score:2)
Compression is, after all, for losers.
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My cellphone has an OpenGL ES rendering engine, as do many of the new generation of smartphones.
Despite that, I'm willing to bet the problem with this cloud computing engine is not the bandwidth, if they get it worked out, but the latency with the display. It's bad enough playing online and having lag issues. But now I have to wait for my screen to update?
Re:Wow, streamed 3D games.. (Score:5, Funny)
What does your friend use?
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