·         Integrate technology to do new things

·         Collaborate intimately with our customers and business partners to help solve their problems

·         Impact the market

I want to dissect that second bullet about customer and business partner intimacy. A lot of companies say they embrace it, but what does it really mean? I actually like the Wikipedia definition of customer intimacy  and about how it creates a virtuous circle: the better the supplier knows the customer’s objectives and difficulties, the better able the supplier is to provide a customized solution. The more adapted the supplier’s product or service is, the happier the customer will be, and the stronger the bond is between the two parties.

AMD’s latest bonding effort comes in the form of the AMD Fusion Partner Program, launched today.  At its core, the new program is about simplification. We are making it simpler to be one of AMD’s channel partners. We are simplifying channel partners groups and benefits. We are making it easier for our partners to offer AMD-on-AMD-on-AMD systems.   The specifics of the new program are outlined by David Kenyon here in AMD’s worldwide channel blog.

By making it simpler for our channel partners to do business with us, we’re hoping to create closer, more effective business relationships with them.   We want to work with our channel partners to better understand their customers’ needs.  And by creating this level of closeness and simplifying the way we do business, we’re enabling our channel partners to form closer bonds with their customers.

Because around AMD, you won’t ever hear the phrase “Don’t take it personally – It’s just business.” For us, when it comes to our customers and our channel partners, business is personal.  

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.

I first learned to edit video at school, maybe 30 years ago, on reel-to-reel Sony black and white video machines. The process was not as disruptive as, say, editing sound tape with a razor blade (see my years at the BBC about 25 years ago) but one error could ruin many hours of great work with one wrong button press.

Since then we have come a long way, and now video editing is a real-time (nearly), computer-enabled marvel.  What back then only a well-funded company could do with a Quantel Paintbox,  now you and I can do on PCs that, even when you go crazy and over-configure, cost less than $1000.

Ironically, the software can now cost more than that, but that is where the power is.

For many years, off-line editing on PCs was a bust for me. It was expensive and the drivers for the video boards were terrible; I used to joke that the time it took to update the drivers was faster than the time it took me to do an editing job. I did love Adobe Premiere (first really good editing software I used) but I hated the PC experience.

Truth is I went Mac!  

But now, happily, I’m at AMD and have a new AMD Phenom™ II 3Gz Quad-core with Dual ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 cards. That’s one heck of a lot of processing power.  But the issue for me was that, from my Mac days, I know FCP keyboard shortcuts in my sleep: since I went Mac – could I go back?

That question may now be irrelevant thanks to two pieces of software and some nifty enablement courtesy of AMD Fusion.

I will write more on Sony Vegas 9 another day (but I LOVE the new interface and it’s much faster) but today I wanted to talk about Adobe Premiere as part of the latest CS4.

The Next Wave of Video Editing

AMD has just announced a beta plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 that dramatically improves the performance of a range of complex video editing tasks. The plug-in is the result of an ongoing collaboration between Adobe and AMD engineers designed to take advantage of ATI Stream technology in a way that allocates processing between available system CPU and GPU resources for maximum application performance.

The Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 plug-in draws on the computational power of both the CPU and GPU to improve the program’s performance. ATI Stream technology allows the powerful GPU to be used for more than just graphics processing, resulting in improved general computing power.  This is the industry-changing power of accelerated computing ― the power of Fusion.

In the case of the Adobe Premiere plug-in, a lot of the processing is still being handled by the multi-core CPU, but what is nice here is that I finally get to unlock ATI Stream compute acceleration capabilities sitting on those ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards. Great graphics cards are not just for gamers.

It’s hard for me to give exact measures of the improvement at home ― I just don’t have the measurement tools, but our labs (who have those tools) tell me with the latest Catalyst driver you can see  up to 8 times greater encoding performance. ¹

More specifically, for those looking to build DVDs (or in need of MPEG2 streams) the AMD Fast MPEG2 encoder performs over 178% faster than Adobe default encoder.²  I still like H.264 for quality and compression and the AMD Fast H.264 encoder performs up to 668% faster than Adobe default encoder.

I also dipped into the latest version of Adobe Photoshop and there are lots of ATI Stream accelerated features there too – more on that another time.

Editing has been almost real-time for a few years, and now I’m waiting for rendering and compression to catch up.  In a pre-Stream world it took 8 hours to render my China Olympics video which ended up being 50 GB ― now I need to compress that to fit onto a DVD and onto a Blu-ray. The beta plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 is really starting to take huge chunks out of that problem.  

The future really does seem to be about Fusion.

Now if we could just get Blu-ray players to work faster…

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.

¹The Beta plug-in for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS4 demonstrates significant increases in video encoding performance.  When installed, the plug-in encoded an H.264, 1440×1080i 29.97 frames-per-second, High Quality file in 47.3s; without the plug-in, Adobe Premiere Pro encoded the same file in 372.5s (Custom pre-set based on 1440×1080i 29.97 frames-per-second High Quality where Video Bitrate = CBR 15 Mbps & Audio Bitrate = 128 kbps), demonstrating an almost 8x faster encode time.  The input file size for each comparison was 367 MB.

System Specifications:  AMD Phenom™ II X4 955 3.2GHz processor; 8GB Corsair Dominator CM3X2G1866C9D memory; Sapphire ATI Radeon™ HD4870 1024MB; Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP1.  Performance of the Adobe Premiere Plug-In will vary based on system configuration, ATI Radeon product, source file and output settings used. 

²The Beta plug-in for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS4 demonstrates significant increases in video encoding performance.  When installed, the plug-in encoded an MPEG2, 1440×1080i 29.97 frames-per-second, High Quality file in 38.8s; without the plug-in, Adobe Premiere Pro encoded the same file in 108s (Custom pre-set based on 1440×1080i 29.97 frames-per-second High Quality where Video Bitrate = CBR 15 Mbps & Audio Bitrate = 192 kbps), demonstrating over 178% faster encode time. 

We still believe that.

One of the ways Fusion comes to life is in how a PC is much more than an X86 CPU. The various elements of the PC platform coalesce to improve the user experience and enable the system to get its work done, seamlessly. In that same sense, let us consider how the Fusion brand is being made real every day with ATI Stream technology.

Our ATI Stream technology, which is about sharing workloads between the CPU and the GPU, divides software execution between the various compute engines at the platform level.  Today, more and more applications are highly parallel in their execution, either because the task at hand lends itself to this approach or because software programmers want to take full advantage of the increasingly popular multi-core processors, or perhaps a combination of both. 

This may be a behind the scenes, but its impact is likely very real for you. 

A good example is how video encoding and decoding − or “transcoding” as it is known − has become a mainstream, daily event for the YouTube generation. 

It has fast become central to many consumers’ experience to make digital video content available on any screen size and resolution, high definition or standard, regardless of how the original content was formatted.  What many consumers don’t realize is that this is a highly complex problem that can consume huge amounts of compute resources, often requiring hours rather than minutes or seconds to complete.

As it turns out, transcoding is a highly parallel computing problem, with relatively few instructions being hammered against a huge amount of data, something that graphics processors are particularly good at doing.  To that end, we are working closely with ISVs like Cyberlink and ArcSoft to help them embed a video transcoder in their applications that can leverage ATI Stream technology to greatly accelerate transcoding.  We even offer a free, basic utility that performs video transcoding on many of our latest ATI Radeon™ graphics cards, using the latest ATI Catalyst™ 9.5 driver.  Click here for a blog that includes a “how to” video showing how easy it is to work with video files and the ATI Video Converter.

Beyond transcoding, programmable ATI GPUs are rapidly expanding their role in compute platforms to perform diverse tasks, such as taking advantage of their hundreds of cores for protein folding in life-science research, seismic simulations for geophysical exploration, data encryption and many more applications through ATI Stream.  You can see here how financial data analysis is greatly accelerated with a GPU. 

What is particularly exciting about ATI Stream technology is where it is going.  Programming multi-core architectures is getting more standardized and straight-forward through the OpenCL specification, something AMD is already leveraging.   AMD showed an OpenCL demonstration of Havok Cloth™ game physics at the recent Game Developers Conference (GDC). 

And because OpenCL is exactly that − free and open − the barrier to entry for programming multi-core systems is getting lower.

Later this year, AMD plans to release a new ATI Stream Software Development Kit which will make OpenCL widely available for AMD hardware.  Also planned are modifications at the chip-level designed to leverage the OpenCL specification. 

I will talk more about ATI Stream throughout the year with other specific examples of how AMD’s unique combination of CPU and GPUs are supercharging performance.  In the meantime, you can read more about this here.

And as we like to say, The Future is Fusion.

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.

I am getting lots of question about the "AMD Fusion Render Cloud" project we introduced at CES and what exactly we are talking about.

As ever – it’s easier to show you than tell you. So as we say, see for yourself!

By the way, you may want to jump to 2mins 22 second in.

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.