CES 2009: AMD’s Meyer Discusses ‘Fusion’ With Partners At CES

By Colleen Bohen -- TWICE, January 8, 2009

Las Vegas — AMD president and CEO Dirk Meyer discussed his company’s efforts to collaborate with various partners in order to develop next-generation technologies. The discussion was part of an Industry Insider Series session Thursday, here at International CES.

Meyer began by briefly addressing the challenging macroeconomic situation facing the entire industry.
 
“No question, this is a challenging time for all of us across the supply chain,” he said. “Regardless of how the economy fares … we are all in the midst of a sea change” in terms of technology.

Myer suggested, “As stress accelerates how a person might age, it might also affect how companies and industries might change.”

The changes forthcoming from AMD appear inextricably linked to the various technologies it is working to create with its partners. “In a competitive world, no organization can do it themselves,” explained Meyer.

During the session, Meyer invited various representatives from AMD’s partner companies to join him on stage to discuss the company’s joint ventures.

Meyer stressed the role his company is playing in the convergence of “cinematic and interactive” technologies so that, for example, a video game creator can create games that look even more realistic than ever before and so that a filmmaker can create CGI animation in a fraction of the time, using less hardware and performing these tasks dramatically faster and cheaper than ever before.

Kevin Clark, IT operations director for Lucasfilm, joined Meyer to discuss how the 4-year partnership between their two companies had helped Lucasfilm to create movies like “Transformers,” “IronMan” and “Poseidon” using a “scalable, cost-effective architecture.”

Jules Urbach, CEO of LightStage and OTOY, took this demonstration a step further by showing how the LightStage CGI rendering technology, along with AMDs new Dragon platform — now available for OEMs — makes it possible for animators to render realistic characters on screen faster than ever before.

Arthur Lewis, president of Alienware and general manager of the Dell Gaming Group, stopped in to highlight its new XPS625, which combined with the Dragon platform, he said, provided the “realisim and immersion” that he believes gaming enthusiasts are after “at a price we’ve never seen before.” The PC, launching this week, starts at $999.

Lewis said the new technology allowed his company to target “the growing number of gamers who previously though a performance PC (at this level) was outside their budget.”

Meyer and Jules Urbach, CEO of LightStage and OTOY, used the session to announce that AMD and OTOY have been working together to create what they called “the world’s fastest supercomputer,” which they duo predicted would help make it possible to push the concept of cloud computing into the mainstream by making it easier to stream rich-content through the Web. They explained that for the end user, this could mean the eventual ability to play graphic-rich video games or high-definition video on any mobile device that supports HTML Web browsing.

Meyer also unveiled AMD’s new Yukon platform with the help of Satjiv Chahil, Hewlett-Packard’s global marketing senior VP, personal systems group.

Meyer explained that the new Yukon platform is designed to accommodate a new subcategory of notebook that the company is calling “Slimline.” He said that AMD found that there was a “gap in the market” between mini notebooks, or netbooks, and traditional notebooks.

“Up to this point, consumers have been disappointed with the lack of full function in mini notebooks,” he said. He explained that, in turn, AMD developed a notebook that had a small form factor and an affordable price but that didn’t require the same performance sacrifice often found in other similarly sized and priced notebooks.

HP is the first to bring a slimline device to market with its new dv2 laptop, which it is launching here at CES.

In all, Meyer said, his company is “poised for the next great leap forward in digital computing and visual computing.”