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AMD Preps For Server Graphics Push

Posted by Soulskill on from the servers-need-to-be-able-to-play-quake-too dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "AMD named John Gustafson as senior fellow and chief product architect of AMD's Graphics Business Unit, the former ATI graphics business unit. Gustafson, known for developing a key axiom governing parallel processing, will apply that knowledge to AMD's more traditional graphics units and GPGPUs, co-processors that have begun appearing in high-performance computing (HPC) systems to add more computational oomph via parallel processing. At the Hot Chips conference, AMD's chief technical officer, Mark Papermaster, also provided a more comprehensive look at AMD's future in the data center, claiming that APUs were the keystone of the 'surround computing era,' where a wealth of data — through sensors, gestures, voice, augmented reality, metadata, and HD video and graphics — will need to be contextualized, analyzed, and either encrypted or assigned privacy policies. That, of course, means the cloud must shoulder the computational burden."

2 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. That oughta work by Cute+Fuzzy+Bunny · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Geez, didn't we have this stuff years ago, only it was called mainframes and minicomputers?

    Someone refresh my memory as to why we fled those for PC's? Oh yeah, it cost too much to centralize, the 'one size fits all' solutions actually fit no one, and it took too long to wait for someone to fix things or come up with new tools.

    Same problem with "the cloud". Good luck with it.

    1. Re:That oughta work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We have things we didn't have last time.
                Massive central storage
                Enormous bandwidth
                Excellent frameworks for distributed processing (no RPC does not count)

      Long ago.. your Cloud had to be custom built for the app. EC2 doesn't have that restriction. I know the people who developed S3. They had no idea they'd be hosting thier Killer App. (Netflix) at design-time. It's that flexible.

      Plus, we now have PCs. No one is saying we have to go back to thin clients, you can keep your PC, and you the cloud where it excels. Gmail and Netflix Streaming are both things for which I've done the equivalents on home servers, and they don't hold a candle to the cloud versions.