I have decided that Charlie Boswell has the best job at AMD.

It isn’t the best paid position in the company, and it doesn’t yield the most kudos, but I think if I was capable of doing what he does (which I am not) it might have been the perfect job for me. What does Charlie do? He gets to help people make better movies and by people, I mean legendary filmmaking teams led by the likes of George Lucas and Robert Rodriguez. For a kid from Nottingham who bought his first film magazine at age 12 – like WOW!

Over the last week I have had a chance to work with Charlie and others across the company on our Cinema 2.0 initiative. So I am living out my dreams, even if somewhat vicariously!

The idea behind Cinema 2.0 is not new. What is new is our ability to actually demonstrate what it envisions. The concept is this – fuse the realistic images of film with the interactivity of game playing. Cinema 2.0 is the culmination of a lot of hard work and innovation, leaving us poised to deliver fully interactive, cinema-realistic experiences to film and games. Let me fight Count Rugen in place of a battered Inigo Montoya (although I understand he killed his father and he has to die).  I want to be in the bar and explain what Rosebud is or was (does that spoil the film?) I know that’s very “Purple Rose of Cairo” of me, but it just sounds like fun a thing to do. (OK – enough cinema references).

The challenge here of course is two-fold. First you have to make the experience cinema-realistic, and second, you have to be able to render that experience in real time. Let’s take them one at a time.

Watch the latest Ruby demo here and tell me, how realistic does the taxi and cityscape look?

While I can’t know how fast your connection is, on my PC the Ruby demo is pretty real-life. Actually, till you see the game playing elements coming in, it would be easy to believe that this was a filmed New York City scene. It’s not. What you’re seeing is a totally digital stage with buildings that, like in a real movie set, are just facades.

Now, how do you render in real time? That takes a lot of graphics processing horsepower.

The new ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 X2 graphics card delivers that horsepower, and then some.  It packs 2.4 teraFLOPs of visual compute power for around $549 US MSRP. By the way, that’s 200 times more processing power than IBM’s famed Deep Blue – the first supercomputer to beat reigning World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov.¹ What’s more, if you lined-up one of every generation of game console from the last 30 years – the ATI Radeon 4870 X2 with two RV770 GPUs is three times more powerful than all of them combined.²

So how long will it be till we have a thriving marketplace offering cinema-realistic games and interactive movies?

The answer is that it starts now – the film and gaming industries simply needed the processing power to create them. That horsepower has landed. But I don’t want you to think that Cinema 2.0 is the end game here. It’s not; it is just one application of this technology.

Imagine a world where you can’t tell the difference between the real and the virtual image. Where education and training and healthcare and communication and so many other things are all done as if you were on the Holodeck of the starship USS Enterprise…that is the vision we at AMD are marching toward. Like others, we have been pondering a name for this type of experience – we like “eye-def computing.”

Today’s hi-def displays show about 4 megapixels of data (makes me wonder why I bought a 10 megapixel camera but that’s another subject). An eye-def experience requires about 324 megapixels of data – nearly 100 times more than hi-def. So it may be a while before we can challenge Geordi La Forge to a game of chess in our home Holodeck, but we can see that day coming.

But eye-def computing is not primarily about 324 megapixels; we define it as the art and science of achieving digital experiences that seem optically real.

By the way – I am aware that a ‘real’ Holodeck, also delivers tactile response. I’m happy to leave that problem till next year.

Make it so, Commander Worf!

1.    The calculation for compute power, described as floating point operations per second (FLOPS), is clock speed x stream processors x 2 (a function of multiply-add, otherwise known as a MAD).  The ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 has 2 GPUs, each with a clock speed of 750 Megahertz, or 750 million hertz, and 800 stream processors, each capable of a MAD cycle, or one multiple and one add operation per clock cycle.  2 x 625000000 x 800 x 2 = 2.4 x 1012, or 2.4 trillion floating point operations per second.  Deep Blue was capable of 11.38 billion floating point operations per second, as reported in Wikipedia. 

2.    The amount of compute power of all game console models combined is estimated to be 781 billion floating point operations per second, based on research by Jon Peddie Research Inc., released in April 2008.

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.