News AMD demos Fusion Render Cloud

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2009/01/09/amd-demos-fusion-render-cloud/1

CES 2009: AMD President and CEO Dirk Meyer demonstrated the next era of cloud computing, the HD Cloud, during his keynote address at CES.

 

That's truly amazing. I can't wait to hear more about it.

 

So wait.

That thing plays crysis FOR me?

 

Nice, so in the future instead of paying hundreds of pounds to upgrade our own PC's, we let AMD upgrade theirs and we just have a thin client at home instead of a PC.

Sounds good to me. will be like a guarantee that everyone can play the latest game from a tiny thin client terminal hidden in a desk or even monitor.

 

So basically it takes your local input (keyboard+mouse), sends it over the internet to their servers, which render the game and send it back as a video stream? That's really cool except for the bandwidth problem: most peoples' internet connection struggles with iPlayer, let alone the high quality version.

Did they mention what resolutions were possible over ADSL?

 

By the looks of it those are 19" TFTs with a native resolution of ~1280x1024? So this little window with the game is what? 640? 800? Not enough for all those 280 Triple-SLI or 4870X2 CF-X people out there. Sounds like an awesome idea though. Like DriftCarl and ch424 said it'd nice to have just a little box standing around somewhere [hidden] plus keyboard and mouse [wireless most likely] and just play your favorite game without having to have the most up to date hardware.

What impact that'd have on my electricity bill!!! Holy s***!

I think I want it. Even if it means back to gaming at 'low resolutions'.

 

I don't mind spending cash on hardware and couldn't care less about electricity usage so the idea of entertainment-related remote computing doesn't appeal to me. While i use remote computing/administration extensively (not to mention parallel computing), I need to know the machines I work with and feel the ability to control and to trust them. It's a psychical thing

 

Thin client gaming....never thought I'd see the day.....

 

There's a few advantages to this that nobody's mentioned yet.

Firstly, no more cheating in games since you're just sending key+mouse to them and getting video back.

Secondly, a standard platform so game devs can spend less time bug-hunting and play-testing and just concentrate on getting the game to actually be any good.

Thirdly, solves the piracy problem pretty much, meaning the game devs have nothing else to blame when their crap game doesn't sell.
This could also lead to a reasonable pay-per-play model and make game demo's worthless.
They could just give you 4 hours free play to let you work out if you liked it.

Lots of potential but a worrying amount of scope for devs to abuse it to milk their customers.

 

Hence it obvioulsy won't be an option for everyone right away. Also, I welcome something like this because it will encourage ISPs to finally do something about an infrastructure that will make gigabit internet (both up' and down') possible where it already isn't.

 

Gigabit intenet? Where? In the UK? Rest of Europe? Don't think so. Not in the near future. Germany has a 75 Mbit connection available, that's the fastest I know of. Standard in Germany is 8-16 Mbit which is okay but not anywhere fast enough for thin-client gaming or live-HD streaming.

 

I think Japan has a 100Mbit service available, however, the same applies it's simply not enough. And if they had 1000 users wouldn't that still be like having one graphics card per computer? Not to mention lag issues and video compression which is my main concern. To deliver me uncompressed video at the same quality I can produce on my desktop would require sending me 5-15 TB of data in only several hours. I run 1900X1200 and I'm not giving up a single pixle to mpeg, snipeing would be impossible!

All that said I would greatly appreciate being able to render my 3DS max stuff on it.

 

There was a news article here on BT a while ago about 1Gbit internet to be made available in Japan. Sad we're that far behind...

 

So the compute cloud decodes Blu-Ray and then streams it to your PC? But if it has been decoded remotely, then the bandwidth requied would be mammoth - uncompressed 24fps 1080p needs over a gigabit per second, so they must use some kind of compression to transfer it, which (a) needs to be decompressed at the client end; and (b) will surely introduce some additional quality loss. Cool as a tech demo, but I really don't see the practical use. Remote gaming, maybe, but remote movie decoding? Nah.

 

Remote blu-ray will never happen, can you imagine the kittens the mpaa and sony would have sending their precious movies over the internet. Look at the lengths they went to securing play back kit in the first place.

Now you and I know you could mostly secure it using encryption but execs tend to have the tech smarts of a mammoth and tbh i'd like to keep sony as far away from the IP spec as possible.

 

ISPs complain about bbc iplayer...heh.

 

Depends on the compression. If its a lossless compression then it'll not lose anything. It might introduce stuttering etc though if the CPU at your end isn't powerful enough to decode the compression in real time.
Which, kinda defeats the point of the whole thin-client concept...

 

Show me a lossless codec that can compress full HD video to a manageable bitrate for streaming over the internet and I'll eat my own shirt. It just seems pointless - any device capable of receiving and making use of a 1080p stream will likely have sufficient power to decode the original VC-1 or H264 video stream locally, so all the AMD Cloud does (apart from act as a neat tech demo) is massively increase the bandwidth required to get the same effect.

 

The point is, the bandwidth isn't there yet for making any use of this tech. Its only showing its possible if the Internet speeds to the home increase significantly.

I'm not sure about this, but I thought the main overhead with watching Bluray was the massive overhead on processing power needed to decrypt everything on the fly? Surely, if something else was doing this and just passing all the pre-decrypted content directly to something like a thin client, the thin client wouldn't need much power to simply display it?
ie, the render-cloud would be doing the work of a standalone bluray player and the thin client would be acting like a TV?

 

A TV that decodes the re-encoded HD content.
I can see mclean's point. If you have to decode the stream, you'd rather not waste all that bandwidth... at least I wouldn't.