AMD invests in CiiNOW to provide first cloud gaming solution powered by AMD Radeon
AMD announced 9/11/2012 an investment in CiiNOW, a provider of cloud gaming technology that enables game publishers, retailers and carriers to tap into the growing video game market expected to reach $81 billion by 20161. AMD, through AMD Ventures, has invested in an innovative software company serving a large and growing market that can create better end-user experiences by taking advantage of AMD technologies. With the investment and strategic collaboration facilitated by AMD Ventures, AMD and CiiNOW will work jointly to enable the best online gaming experience possible through a vibrant worldwide developer ecosystem and differentiated hardware.
The cloud gaming industry, which was once thought of as technologically impossible, is now disrupting the gaming market for both consumers and game publishers as more and more casual and hardcore gamers are making the jump to playing games online. CiiNOW addresses this trend with the first cloud gaming solution powered by AMD Radeon™ graphics that offers a cost-effective, end-to-end solution that includes the full suite of required hardware and software components. CiiNOW delivers a high-speed, low latency, streaming solution with up to eight HD streams per server blade, and up to 272 HD streams per server rack for HD quality game streaming instantly from the cloud for ubiquitous game streaming across all subscribers, devices and access technologies.
“CiiNOW is on the cutting-edge of online game streaming technology, and it’s clear we share the same vision to drive the cloud gaming industry forward and ultimately provide the best gaming experience,” said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Heterogeneous Applications and Developer Solutions at AMD. “AMD’s investment signifies our mutual drive to liberate gamers from today’s constraints and move us to the next era of digital content.”
AMD Press Release
“From our perspective it’s very exciting. NVidia is a great partner and we’ll work with them as well, but they don’t control both sides of the gaming industry like AMD – GPU and CPU. As we optimize it’s very helpful in building a balanced system.” CiiNOW CEO and co-founder Ron Haberman told Jason Evangelho, Forbes.
JE: The subscription model seems viable; are there any hurdles on the way to mass adoption of cloud gaming?
RH: To date, one of the biggest concerns with cloud gaming is performance in general. When we created our platform, we paid most attention to the image quality. Not only are we much lower latency than Gaikai, but we compare favorably even to local instances like Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.
The other side of this coin is it has to be economical to offer all this horsepower to the users. So what CiiNOW brings to the table is a hardware-independent virtualization layer where you can run many many games on a single piece of silicon (both CPU and GPU). Depending on the game and the level of quality the customer is looking for, the operator can configure and optimize the amount of resources needed for a particular game.
[Author's Note: Mr. Haberman tells me that CiiNOW recommends a peak bandwidth of 6Mb/s for optimum quality. This would result in 720p/60fps image quality. Their image quality adapts dynamically to network conditions]
Forbes