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AMD announces Sky Graphics as part of cloud gaming strategy
AMD is making a new push into cloud gaming. The company today announced the Sky series of Radeon graphics cards, designed especially with cloud gaming in mind. The line includes three enterprise-grade cards, with the high-end Sky 900 incorporating a whopping 3,584 stream processors, 6GB of GDDR5 memory and a memory bandwidth of 480GB per second. The cards are built on AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture and use RapidFire technology, which it says allows for "highly efficient and responsive game streaming."The company is "working closely" with several cloud gaming companies to take advantage of the new line of cards, including Otoy, Ubitus, G-Cluster and CiiNow. The latter in particular was promoted heavily, with AMD noting that, paired with its new Sky cards, CiiNow is capable of delivering content to a broad range of devices including game consoles, tablets and, of course, computers. Furthermore, it claimed that CiiNow offers lower latency than competitors like Gaikai and, somehow, even lower latency than the local signal between a game console and a television.Nvidia made similar claims about its Grid cloud technology last year, at which time Ubitus and G-Cluster were also announced as partners. Awkward.
Cable, IPTV providers reportedly testing cloud-based HD gaming for launch next year
The next generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft haven't even been announced yet but their best competition may be from your cable TV / internet provider, according to a report from Bloomberg. The only-too-eager-to-talk people familiar with the matter named AT&T U-Verse, Verizon FiOS and Time Warner Cable as services preparing tests before the end of the year with general availability planned for 2013. Comcast and Cox were also name dropped as potential candidates to bring console-quality HD games directly to customers, based on tech from startups like Playcast, CiiNOW and Agawi. Of course, while we've seen this sort of setup before (as seen above, check out an awesomely 90s Sega Channel ad after the break) and recently from OnLive and Gaikai, cloud gaming has yet to catch on in a major way. Whether this potential approach is all smoke or will actually turn into reality has yet to be seen, but after TV Everywhere we wouldn't be surprised to see providers toss in gaming as another incentive for subscribers not to cut the cord. [Image credit: Sega Retro]
