The AMD ”What would you do with 48 cores?” contest asks you to write an essay/blog or video describing what you would do with a 48 core system to make the world a better place. The winner receives an $8,100 setup including a TYAN 4S board and four 12-core Opteron Magny Cours processors.
Hopefully, there will be some interesting entries and the winner will be someone who can really take advantage of what is essentially a supercomputer setup. In particular I was thinking that some OpenCL-savvy developer would describe a compelling new solution since OpenCL can take advantage of all 48 CPU cores (as well as the more traditional GPU cores).
The actual prize is:
Four new AMD Opteron processors Model 6174, 12-core (2.2 GHz)
TYAN S8812 motherboard: the motherboard is a Tyan S8812 that features 4 processor sockets with the capacity for you to install up to 8 DIMMs per socket
Industrial design students are invited to create home appliances that take into consideration, the shrinking domestic spaces. Your ideas will shape how people prepare and store food, wash clothes, and do dishes in the homes of 2050 when 74%* of the world’s population are predicted to live in an urban environment. Growing populations living in concentrated areas dictate a need for greater space efficiency. This year, special consideration will be given to designers that submit a design within the context of a range or suite of solutions/appliances. The design ideas should address key consumer requirements; being green, adaptive to time and space, and allowing for individualization.
Deadline: 1 May, 2010
Prizes:
1st prize: €5,000 + 6 months’ paid internship at an Electrolux global design center.
2nd prize: €3,000
3rd prize: €2,000
The video below gives more details. So industrial design students, use your FirePro (or other) cards and win the challenge!
I go to presentations to learn about what the speaker has to say, but it never hurts that there are random drawings for cool prizes at the end . At SolidWorks World 2010, the AMD crew were giving out FirePro cards at several of the presentations. In the pics below the winners from the talks on “Creating Great Images Easily With RealView and PhotoView 360”, “SolidWorks Graphics Performance Analysis & Tuning”, and a winner just for showing up at the AMD booth at the right time of day!
The video says it all (but by way of credibility, the wooly monkey I used to care-take in college could actually work the vending machines!)
FYI: AMD said they always have tech experts claiming how difficult it is to install a graphics card. So to prove them wrong AMD decided to show that it’s so easy, even a monkey can do it. To create this video ATI actually trained a monkey (Louie) to install a video card. It certainly does prove the point.
Just in time for the climate summit in Copenhagen, the Autodesk Clean Tech Partner Program grants free design and engineering software to early-stage clean technology companies in North America who are working to solve some of the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. The grant gives you up to five licenses each of Inventor, Revit, Vault, Showcase, NavisWorks and Alias Design. Kudos to Autodesk! Would like to see more companies put their money where there mouth is.
Update 9/22 - OK - although I thought the YouTube video I had up was a great example of nerd humor, it seems it riled up a few folks and I was asked to pull it off of Fireuser. So I pulled it. I want to emphasize that no harm was intended. I found this video when doing a search for “ATI Evergreen” shortly after the AMD event on Sept 20. The new DX11 cards from AMD are a big thing, and I was looking for footage form the event, but this video caught my attention and appealed to nerdish humor side. By the way, if anyone was able to get some footage of the DX11 cards in action for professional applications, drop me a line!
I can’t believe I was out of town for AMD’s big Sept 10 event. They announce their Eyefinity multi-display technology (driving up to six monitors simultaneously at resolutions up to 2,560x1,600 pixels each), and they demod Crysis, the standard gaming benchmark for high-end 3D hardware, running on an iPhone. Huh?
At the event, AMD unveiled its next-generation GPU architecture with 2.5 teraFLOPS of floating-point power (over twice current high-end cards!). To show off how this could translate to applications, they showed OTOY’s software, running on AMD servers and new GPUs, delivering 3D games in real-time over the Internet to the iPhone. The report from Ars Technica is impressive and worth the read.
I’m generally not a consumer products follower however I recently saw an ATIFirePro twitter post about the Siggraph Production Session Talk Eye-Definition Computing and the Future of Digital Actors, this coming Monday at 3:45PM. So I went to do some research on the presenters and how they all might relate to each other - Jules Urbach from OTOY, Hollywood director Peter Berg (the upcoming remake of “Dune"), and top AMD executive Rick Bergman.
The official blurb reads: Hear these collaborators discuss some of the ground-breaking advances in hardware and software that enables sophisticated real-time rendering techniques and new delivery models, and forthcoming client and server hardware that has the potential to put the equivalent of a Hollywood render farm in a home set-top box.
But with a little research I came up with this post on TechCrunch referring to high-powered server-side rendering for real-time visualization and gaming delivered to ordinary mortals using any client device through the browser - such as your set top box, your iPhone, your laptop or desktop - at 60 FPS.
No clue if this is what will be shown, but if it is, this is a session not to be missed (also if Rick Bergan is showing up this is probably pretty significant to attend). The video below is not a marketing demo, but from a skeptical Tech Crunch writer playing Grand Theft Auto on his computer, through his browser.
StudioGPU announced that MachStudio Pro is now shipping for Windows XP and Vista. MSRP is $4,999 and that includes an AMD ATI FireGL V8650 3D workstation graphics accelerator card (2 GB framebuffer). Here’s the short take home summary: MachStudio Pro harnesses multi-threaded GPU computing so that lighitng and render times can be dramatically reduced from hours to minutes and minutes to seconds or sub-seconds. Comparable final scenes are consistently rendered with MachStudio Pro at rates of 500 to 900 times faster than traditional rendering packages.
I’ve written about MachStudio Pro previously because it really takes advantage of the the FireGL/FirePro GPUs for real-time, non-linear 3D workflows (AMD has a winner on their hands here). But now a few reviews have started to appear that corroborate my first impressions. This software is game changing. Here’s a few of the latest:
MachStudio Pro is a jewel in the GPGPU crown Bright Side of News
“3D artists prepare to be amazed - StudioGPU released MachStudio Pro. If you thought that Modo was pretty rad, you haven’ seen anything yet.”
MachStudio Pro democratizes content creation studiodaily blogs
“MachStudio Pro isn’t simply about a dramatic speed-up in rendering time: it’s about subverting the production-line assembly of CG images, in which each task–lighting, texturing, cameras–is an island. Instead, MachStudio Pro aims for a nonlinear pipeline in which any aspect of the image can be tweaked at any point in the creation process.”
StudioGPU replaces computer animation render farms with $5,000 PC VentureBeat
“I’ve seen the demo with my own unbelieving eyes. A single graphics accelerator card on a standard Intel-powered PC can now render in seconds what used to take a roomful of servers all day.”
The latest HP xw9400 Workstation can be customized with up to two six-core AMD Opteron CPUs (as in 12 cores) and a FirePro V7750. Not much more to say then that workstation should be able to kick some serious 3D butt.
FireUser.com is a community resource for visualization, 3D, video and engineering professionals to learn about the latest acceleration and display technologies, discuss support issues, as well as influence the features and direction of the FireGL and FirePro accelerator line.
I can’t believe I was out of town for AMD’s big Sept 10 event. They announce their 
