IT vendors seem to believe that if you say the word "cloud" enough, an marginal business idea will yield up revenues and profits. Much the same thing happened with grid computing - remember that? - before it morphed with utility computing into the even more nebulous cloud moniker.
So it is with the AMD Fusion Render Cloud, which would have simply been another example of a render farm used to create 3D images for computer simulations or movies if not for the cloud bit. It includes some clever software made by OTOY that allows 3D, high-definition graphics to be rendered on a set of remote servers and then displayed down the wire to a relatively modest PC or laptop. Think of it as a mainframe for graphics processing made from workstations, and you get the right idea.
Dirk Meyer, AMD's chief executive officer, presented the Fusion Render Cloud, a cluster of machines based on AMD's Phenom II processors, AMD 790 chipsets, and ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics processors that will have over 1,000 GPUs and will deliver over 1 petaflop of aggregate computing power than can be brought to bear on remote rendering jobs.
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