AMD man has poetic mission

"THE ARTIST WANTS to create, and the consumer wants to be immersed in that creation," says Charlie Boswell in the process of explaining the limitations he wants to remove. "I believe technology and its culture have been a lot of the impediment." If, for example, you're trying to create special effects for a movie, it "kills the creative buzz" to have to wait while the images are rendered.

Boswell has one of the most unusual jobs in the technology industry: as the head of the digital media and entertainment unit at AMD, he spends a lot of time schmoozing the stars. Or, as he puts it, "turning over rocks, looking for opportunities." Those rocks include the Grand Ole Opry, film director Robert Rodriguez, and Star Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith. His qualifications are also a bit unusual: he's a music school dropout turned computer engineer with eight patents to his name.

In 2000, he had the chance to work on an independent film in Austin, Texas, where he and AMD are based, and the film appeared in local cinemas and got Boswell some media attention. When then chief operating officer Hector Ruiz, now CEO, saw Boswell's interview on Good Morning, America, he became Boswell's mentor and sponsor. AMD's culture, says Boswell, made it possible to "mix passion with their products."

There are two kinds of limitations Boswell talks about. One is simple stability. "The Grand Ole Opry has one of the most sophisticated TV/radio production facilities in the world," he says. "And they were using our competitor's technology, and on average every 45 minutes it would crash. They built their entire facility around rebooting every 45 minutes. They contacted us, put the dual Opteron in, and ran for 18 hours and only shut it off because it filled the disk drives." Note that he does not blame Windows, which he describes as "an incredible operating system." (It's a possibly amusing quirk that Boswell never speaks the name of "our competitor". Is Intel, like Voldemort, too evil to name?)

But the other, more significant limitation is a trend he sees these days that humans are becoming so adapted to the limitations of their technology that they let it constrain what they can do, say, and even think about.

"You look at current trends," he says. "People are using words to perform sentences and exchanging thoughts, but the way the trend is in some companies, they want to use prewritten music, or communicate in prewritten paragraphs. It's lowering the human aesthetic."

This kind of limitation even extends beyond the ordinary corporate environment. "I talked to a University of Texas group of architects, and two of them said they've noticed that even some buildings in cityscapes are having only the attributes that the tool will allow them to have." He calls this left-hemisphere thinking, and blames it for "tending toward commodity and mass production." He adds, "I believe that this proclivity for left hemisphere thinking has really impacted our language." And language "affects the mind." If Shakespeare were writing "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" now, it would be a bulleted list.

But in order to remove all those limitations from the lives of other people, AMD faces more profound limitations. "We're fighting physics, hitting atomic limits." Until now, "The way to increase processor power has always been to shrink die size and distances. But as you continue to shrink it's hard to contain the heat that's escaping. So we're going to multicore, which AMD has really been driving." AMD's Direct Connect Architecture, he says, removes bottlenecks in other areas of the platform, and is intended to make it easy for customers to upgrade. Recently, they doubled the capacity of Robert Rodriguez's render farm "without moving a wire - just by replacing the chip."

Let Apple have the product placement. Boswell would rather be the technology behind the throne. µ

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and a page linking to articles in this series. Readers are welcome to send email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).