AMD tries to jam Intel's signal

IF YOU ARE AMD, what do you do to counter Intel's Penryn launch last Monday? Well, you get a satellite truck, a CTO, and a rooftop in NYC, and get the word out to the unwashed press.

AMD did just that, and the pitch was about 'game supercomputing'. Basically if you take the Spider platform, a 790 mobo, a Phenom of one flavour or other, and four RV670 GPUs, you can run the art assets from the original Spiderman movie in real time. All this for under $2000, or it will be under $2000 when it officially comes out in a week.

You almost assuredly have seen the type of video blurbs in question, five-minute Q&A sessions on the local news talking about something by someone important, but you probably have never seen how they are actually done. There is a lot of work and sweating to make that five-minute clip happen.

In this case, it was Phil Hester of AMD in the hot seat, or cold windy seat as the case may be. The day started out just after midnight, a wedding was finishing up one floor down in the swanky Manhattan studio, and the stale beer hadn't even been mopped up off the floor.

So you want this in high earth orbit ASAP...

In those wee morning hours, the truck pulled up and setup began. This is a multi-million dollar mobile satellite unit capable of slinging HD signals into high earth orbit where hopefully something will send them back down. Take note of the width of the street, the building in the background, and the cables running off the top right.

Those cables went up 12+ stories to the top of the building where a mini TV studio was set up on the roof. Several macs, a lot more AV equipment, enough wires to confuse a telephone repairman, and power breakout boxes that made me drool, and you ended up looking like this.

The scenic view is the other way

That is Phil Hester on the left in the chair, a bit of the Spider box poking out from his right side, and some of the crew listening intently to the voices in their ears and looking confused. Actually, they rarely looked confused, more intensely focused on voices only they could hear, it just looked slightly odder than the guy in the car next to you having an animated argument over a hands free phone.

The interviews, starting from just after 8am to just after noon, went in a soon to be familiar pattern, five minutes of talk, followed by a quick run down one floor into the heated areas, five more minutes of shivering, and 30 minutes of nothing. Rinse and repeat.

The questions that only Phil could hear all had familiar answers, 'Starting at about $1000 and going to a max of about $2000', 'from most PC vendors starting next week' and so on and so on. To his credit, Phil Hester did not visibly show signs of imminent frostbite even though it was obvious that he wanted little more than his overcoat.

The message that Phil conveyed over and over again is that with Spider, you can take the art assets from the original Spiderman movie and run them at 30FPS. All this takes is a 790FX board, a Phenom X4 and 4 RS670s, well within shooting range for a mid to high end gaming rig. What took over a day a frame then is now realtime.

What it looks like at home

To most people, the final product looked like this, a talking CTO on the local news. The message of game supercomputing went out to just about every major US and Canadian TV network, the BBC, and many others, more than a dozen in the final count. All had live interviews with the CTO of AMD with a really nice backdrop of the NYC skyline.

On a humourous note, remember the building and the narrow street mentioned earlier? One of the interviews was with the AP, their building is just behind the satellite truck. The truck took up more than half the width of the street, and the cables ran about 150 feet straight up.

The AP interview sent the signal down 12+ flights of stairs, to a satellite about 23,000 miles away, and then back down 23,000 miles to one of the above about 50 feet from the interview as the laser bounces. The cables to the truck could have reached the AP person and come back with a little extra left over to jump rope with.

You could hit them with a long stick

All this goes to show that when geeks are involved, you can take something that could be done with $50 worth of Cat5 cable and use several hundred million dollars worth of tech and rockets to accomplish the same goal. Then again, getting word out to the BBC would require a bit more Cat5.

In the end, there was a lot of work, a lot of downtime, and more than a dozen interviews. There were no technical snafus, no fires, and in general, everything went smoothly. Chill aside, the NYC skyline is a tough backdrop to beat, and the message is quite powerful if you think about it. What took hours a frame in 2002 is now home video game territory. Not a bad day. µ