14 DAY TRIAL // Seeing as how NVIDIA is already well underway in establishing gaming cloud servers outfitted with its GeForce GRID adapters, it was about time Advanced Micro Devices tried to do something similar.
AMD's response was the Sky series of graphics, revealed during the Game Developer Conference 2013 and consisting of graphics processors similar (but not quite) to the consumer Radeon.
From all we've heard, they may even be marketed under the Radeon brand name, although with the “Sky” codename, we'd have to wonder why that would be.
The products are made with the Graphics Core Next architecture and use RapidFire technology.
PCs, smartphones, tablets and even Smart TVs will eventually benefit from the AMD Sky project (high-end games played online, with no need for powerful hardware in the system).
The strongest AMD Sky model is called Sky 900 and has 6 GB of GDDR5 memory and 3,584 Stream processors, plus a memory bandwidth of 480 GB/s.
That's already very powerful, and knowing that servers/data centers always use more than one card, we can be certain that final installations will easily cope with hundreds of connections.
Among other things, this will add another nail to the figurative coffin of the personal computing industry.
There are already analysts who say that tablets will outsell desktops this year, and notebooks the next.
NVIDIA GeForce GRID and AMD Sky remove the need for powerful CPUs and GPUs, ensuring no hope for recovery.
True, it will take some time for this new idea of online gaming to catch on, but once it does, there are few odds of it failing. Imagine playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on a Smart TV. It sounds impossible, but this is what AMD, like NVIDIA, is vowing to allow for.
So far, Otoy, Ubitus, G-Cluster, and CiiNow have announced partnerships with AMD.