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AMD - Loaded and Back in Action

By Vijay Anand - 1 Jun 2008

AMD's Forecast for the Future

AMD's Forecast for the Future

So far, we've taken quite a comprehensive look at how AMD can and will push ahead to bring them up to the next level of the game and it looks promising despite the fact that the road ahead isn't going to be a smooth one and neither is the competition going to sit still. With all the areas probed into, we had one last parting question for John Taylor:-

HWZ: With the ATI-AMD merger finally settling down, Where do you see AMD heading to with its current products/technologies and of those in the pipeline?

Taylor: Ultimate Visual Experience.

AMD wants to lead with getting more people access to the Internet, affordably and with devices that makes sense for them. We want to continue to lead with energy efficient CPUs, and now we're doing it in the chipsets and on the GPUs which means everything continues to be ever more efficient while increasing the actual performance.

In terms of creating the ultimate visual experience, take for example your science fiction movies like Star Trek: The Next Generation and others. You could see this idea in the future is delivered by visual computing in which you can walk into a room and that room can instantly to your eyes seem like you've gone completely some place else and you're in a different world where it could be wildly fanciful or as normal seeming as your everyday world. We're really close now to achieving that. If you look at games like Crysis and COD 4, they are pretty realistic but they are not the same thing as how realistic some of the things being created on CPUs for over days or weeks in films today. But while we can interact with characters in COD 4, we can't interact with the creatures on film. So it all kind of goes back to what happens in programming. As we're working with companies that are starting to unlock in better ways the power of the GPU, Hollywood is starting to use the GPUs to render films on the GPU, meaning that's something to watch out and see what they come up with. On the other side, we're delivering ever more powerful GPUs without consuming enormous amounts of energy so that you can stack two, three or four of them in your system.

So we're right there at this moment where games are going to go from games that look like games to being things that look like the best digitally rendered scenes in movies, yet they are going to be interactive and you're going to be able to experience them like you're in the real world and with characters looking as real as a person in real life. So that is what's next and that's what I get excited about and you're going to hear a lot about from AMD this year about what it means for movie making and what it means for game play.

If you start to put the pieces together and start to think about things like the Nintendo Wii, the Wii actually has our graphics engine from a few generations ago, but what got people excited was actually the user interface and you've got companies out there working on user interfaces where it's just a camera watching you and responding to your movements on the avatar for whatever the gameplay is. Now let's put it all together, and imagine the gaming experience that is projected on a wall at a resolution that's very satisfying to the human eye, and doesn't make the human eye think it's really missing anything and the creatures that are there, whatever they are, look real. They don't look like video games, they look real and I can interact with it with my body movements. I mean if you're talking about a breakthrough in what gaming is, if you think it's addictive today, just think about what it's going to look like in a couple of years as the game developers figure out how to take advantage of the GPU power. So that's what we mean by ultimate visual experience. Yeah, we mean that a mainstream PC from AMD is a better visual experience than a mainstream PC from the other guy but we also mean 4 years or 6 years from now, we think we've got some big breakthroughs coming in gaming that make the demos you're seeing today seem like child's play. So that's something pretty exciting to watch from AMD.

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