Cloud gaming set to become popular: AMD’s Marinkovic

Cloud gaming is all set to take over the world by storm in the coming years, feels Sasa Marinkovic, Director of AMD’s Gaming Marketing.

“Cloud based services not only enable cross platform gaming between PC and consoles, but also allow running games on smartphones. Our recent partnership with Google’s Project Stream would do just that by enabling Google to push the edge of computing through the cloud, allowing PC games on the cloud to be run in data centres and then streamed on the users’ machines,” Marinkovic told DH in an email interview.

Gaming is big these days and professional gamers are making quite a few bucks. With the advancement of graphics display technology, the trend is likely to grow further in the years to come.

“In the future, PC gaming will provide far superior experience with better graphics and high performance compared to mobile devices and dedicated consoles,” said Marinkovic.

One main reason cloud gaming looks set to be the big thing in the future is limited processing power that many gamers have at their disposal. All gamers may not be able to afford high-end gaming systems. In this scenario, cloud gaming will help because the gamer will get access to high processing power remotely. The user connects remotely and uses powerful processing power.

Marinkovic said AMD is in the process of bringing the Radeon gaming experience to the cloud.

AMD became the first to produce CPU and GPUs with the 7 nanometre (nm) process that the company showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year. More recently, AMD launched the Radeon VII GPU recently.

The 7 nm process is seen as a big step up from the earlier 14 nm process used to make CPUs and GPUs. It effectively means that the processing power is doubled with the new technology.

“The new 7nm GPU card is designed especially for extreme gamers and content creators,” Marinkovic said.

“The next generation GPUs will play a pivotal role in powering emerging technologies such as deep learning, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, cloud computing and graphical rendering applications.

“In addition to the incredible opportunities for creative professionals and gamers, we expect this technology to largely benefit researchers and scientists, especially those working in the field of education, healthcare, climate change and energy solutions, climate sciences,” he added.

Asked how much of a headstart AMD has with the new 7 nm products over rivals Nvidia, Marinkovic said: “Our company CTO Mark Papermaster has said that the new GPU is designed to handle some of the most demanding new workloads that gamers and content creators can throw at it.”

He further added that the new GPU has High Bandwidth Memory 2 (HBM2) with 16 GB of VRAM capacity and one terabyte per second of bandwidth. This, the company claimed, is unmatched by anyone in the industry.

Recent media reports quoted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang hitting out at AMD’s new products saying they were not as good they claimed them to be. However, AMD refuted these claims and its CEO Lisa Su reportedly refused to say too much about Nvidia’s claims.