AMD supercomputer drives HD content to mobiles

AMD has teamed with content developer OTOY to build a supercomputer that will make it possible to port high-definition content wirelessly to mobile devices.

The ‘massively parallel supercomputer’, dubbed AMD Fusion Render Cloud, ‘is being designed to break the one petaFLOPS barrier, and to process a million compute threads across more than 1,000 graphics processors’, according to AMD chief Dirk Meyer.

“We anticipate it to be the fastest graphics supercomputer ever,” said Meyer.

“We plan to have this system ready by the second half of 2009.”

The system is being designed to enable content providers to deliver video games and other graphically-intensive applications hosted in the cloud to virtually any type of mobile device with a web browser.

These devices are typically unable to store and process such content due to device size, battery capacity, and processing power, said Meyer.

It's anticipated that gaming companies will use the supercomputer to develop and deploy next-generation games, create photo-realistic virtual worlds, and take advantage of the mobile delivery channel for complex gaming products.