Quoting a news article from CustomPC:
«AMD’s president, Dirk Meyer, revealed the plans for the supercomputer, called the Fusion Render Cloud, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The colossal machine will be powered by AMD Phenom II processors and 790 motherboard chipsets, along with over 1,000 Radeon HD 4870 GPUs.
The company claims that one purpose of the system is to ‘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 Fusion Render Cloud 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.’»
Although the concept is not new, this seems to be a interesting move from AMD. The main problem to be addressed and necessarily solved is latency (the time delay between the rendering on the supercomputer and presenting the image on the remote client), which depends mostly on external factors…
This is great, it looks like we’re finally moving away from the x86 paradigm. When I say that we’re moving way, I mean, the regular user, not the super powered researcher or developer.
Another example in this field is the new approach from Nvidia and how they are also exploring their GPUS:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_computing_solutions.html
This new GPUs offers a lot of processing power and new features, and power, a lot of power is something that the Cloud will need.
I’ve found this old article about latency when using a HDTV to game playing.
http://gear.ign.com/articles/720/720303p1.html
If we have this kind of problems in here, imagine now the ones that we may have when use a Internet game console with its 120ms average delay.