Interview with Charlie Boswell on Blog Talk Radio - Global Nerding And The Computer Industry

I was recently asked to discuss on Blog Talk Radio about the dangers of Global Nerding and how the computer industry is connected, as well as my experience at CES this year. You can listen to the full interview here:

Blog Talk Radio Interview with Charlie Boswell - AMD’s Entertainment Industry Maestro

Let me know what you think by commenting here or hitting me up on Twitter.

- Boswell

Cloud Computing: Invasion Of The Client Snatchers

I was recently interviewed by Ian McNaughton of AMD for his AMD At Play blog, the full article can be found here.

Check out the interview portion:

"I spent some quality time this week with Charlie Boswell, the guru behind so many cool programs at AMD. Think OTOY, LucasFilm, the digital music recording Industry, and you quickly understand that Charlie has one of the best jobs at AMD in working with these customers and technology partners. Here’s our conversation:

Ian: Charlie, thanks for taking the time today, can you give us the background on our efforts at CES around demo’ing “gaming in the cloud”?

Charlie:

Hello Ian…I’m really pumped about this so I appreciate the chance to discuss. …..here’s the deal.

At this year’s CES AMD rolled out a demo that shows how our platform technology (CPU, GPU, combined with Direct Connect Architecture) is enabling fully interactive cloud gaming. Sounds cool but what exactly is that?

Cloud computing on AMD Fusion technology allows fully interactive game play from virtually any type of client over the Internet because the heavy lifting is being done “server side” in the cloud. The user logs on, clicks open a browser and then starts blasting away. No hours of game installation, no exotic authorization dances, just instant gratification and that’s why I’m excited. My team’s role at AMD is to ensure our technology removes barriers so the user can be about his/her task rather than the technology. That is the main story of cloud computing. Enough preaching but I had to let that fly because it’s a powerful look at a better future for gaming.

The CES demo consisted of an AMD Fusion Render Node (based on AMD “Dragon” platform technology PC platforms) that hosted an off-the-shelf version of EA’s amazing “Mercenaries II” served up via the Internet. The laptop powered by AMD technology was given a URL to click and Mercenaries II fired up. Playback was full screen at 60 frames/sec.



How is this accomplished? Is it a parlour trick? Well, this is not easy to pull off. Jules Urbach, the CEO of OTOY, is the wizard of GPGPU. The software that made this work is from his company. He is to the GPU what Robert Rodriguez (another artist who employs AMD technology) is to digital moviemaking.

Jules is a true innovator and someone who chose AMD because we have all the pieces to make this work. We are the only one-stop-shopping platform solution for cloud computing hardware. The OTOY software harnesses the full power of the AMD platform including CPU, GPU and our Direct Connect high bandwidth interconnect.

In short, the game source code unaltered is hosted on the AMD Fusion Render Cloud hardware and served up on the web via breathtaking OTOY compression technology made possible by the AMD combined platform power. The OTOY software allows multiple instances of a game to be hosted on the AMD Fusion Render node so the solution scales for all the right economic reasons such as energy efficiency, space, quiet operation, etc.

Ian: That technology seems very cool, how is it similar or different to OnLive?

Charlie:

Yes, after the CES announcement of the AMD Fusion Render Cloud with OTOY, OnLive announced their solution at GDC in March. I was thrilled to see their announcement because it was further validation of the space. Both OTOY and OnLive have their unique business models and architectures, but they are similar in that they both require a truly scalable enterprise class backend solution. Implementing a technique I call “Invasion of the Client Snatchers” where you simply connect up a single client machine in the cloud to a user won’t work. It’s not practical or adaptable. You’re just snatching the client from the user and housing it. The Cloud server must behave like a compute cluster and scale organically with the statistical behaviour of the Internet user traffic. It must adapt to available power and bandwidth. It must scale for energy efficiency. It must allow for extensibility. This is where the AMD Fusion Render Node comes into play. You can host multiple simultaneous users on these devices and cluster them in true enterprise class style. Anyway, it’s great to see more teams jumping in. We celebrate the free market because it’s good for the user. Cloud computing is happening and OnLive is another fantastic example.

Ian: TechCrunch had an article a week ago, where they highlighted a game character jumping from a monitor to a notebook while the game was being served from 400 miles away, can you explain the technology behind that?

Charlie:

This is OTOY’s server side rendering in action. The heavy computing, drawing, and encoding are happening server-side in the cloud through the magic of the OTOY architecture host on an AMD Fusion render node. The client is entirely browser based. The bandwidth and latency required for full on interactive game play is made possible by/through the OTOY codec architecture. The performance of this codec meets the “real-time” requirements for first person shooters. Enough said. The AMD Fusion Render Architecture is the scalable foundation that could make this practical, scalable, and deployable across the global Internet.

Ian: To take it a step further, TechCrunch was given an exclusive this week that showed off the AMD/OTOY technology at work on a cell phone! Is this the future of mainstream gaming?

Charlie:

As I said a few moments ago, the uniqueness of the OTOY approach is their ability to serve to a variety of client types: smart phones, PDA, thin client, etc., etc. This is a great proofpoint that the heavy lifting is all done server side on OTOY-AMD Fusion Render Cloud. This is one future for Cloud Computing…turn it on and play. You never get exposed to the seedy side of technology (drivers, installation, updates). All that stuff is under the street just like in Disneyland. This is the future I want….Walt Disney had this figured out a long time ago.

Ian: So, gaming in the cloud is real, when might we see availability?

Charlie:

Ian, you’re seeing some of the promise now. We expect that you’ll see implementations later this year and full-on deployments in 2010.

Ian: Thanks Charlie, one last question, What’s next?

Charlie:

Let me answer that loaded question first by stating the cloud offers the planet at least the hope of a better user experience. My cause celeb on the past 10 years has been to help lobby for a better user experience by shielding the artist from both the tech and its culture. Technology can be unbelievably needy. Example, “hey man, you forgot to load the latest driver or OS update.” I don’t want that ever even said in my presence. I reject that. That is an example of technology sitting on top of humanity. The cloud is going to help eliminate the entire culture that perpetuates useless complexity. The revolution is next because the users demand it. The revolution is next because the economics demand it. If you only market to the geeks, the numbers don’t work do they…"

Have any thoughts? Let me know on Twitter.

- Boswell

Dweezil Zappa Wins Grammy® and Orders AMD Room Service

Photo credit: Michael Mesker

Dweezil Zappa just won a Grammy® Award recently for Best Rock Instrumental. Tell us about how you’re involved in his work.

I met Dweezil Zappa a number of years ago at an AES convention in LA. I’ve been deeply interested in his father’s music since grade school. Therefore, it was an extreme honor to meet Dweezil and his mother Gail. Dweezil was introduced to me because of his plans to use AMD technology not only to produce his own music, but to take some of his father’s existing stuff from the famous Zappa vault and put those historically important tapes into the digital domain. The vault activity is under the direction of Gail Zappa. Dweezil began using AMD workstations as a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) with our 32-bit technology back in 2002. Since then, the relationship has progressed to where Dweezil is using our very latest quad-core processors and ATI graphics on our Fusion platforms at the legendary UMRK (Utility Muffin Research Kitchen) studio founded by his father. Dweezil embarked on the worldwide Zappa Plays Zappa tour in 2007 and that tour has continued into 2009 with several months break here and there. He is using AMD DAWs to record these live shows. The popularity and success of this tour has reaffirmed the global demand for and interest in Frank Zappa’s music. I believe a great deal of the tour’s longevity is attributed to Dweezil’s precise interpretation of his father’s catalog as well as his selection of the current ZPZ lineup. Dweezil is using AMD based Fusion DAWs to mix and master these shows while he’s out on the road and the fans are responding very favorably! These DAWs were manufactured by our excellent friends and partners at PCAudioLabs (www.pcaudiolabs.com).

This new AMD addition to the Dweezil Zappa workflow is called the “Room Service Rig” because it is sometimes operated from a hotel room after a show, or possibly on the bus in between shows. We partnered up with our friends over at Dangerous Music (www.dangerousmusic.com) to make the "Room Service Rig" happen. Dweezil records the shows live, then mixes, masters, and uploads those shows within a few months after a live performance. Dweezil went from zero to sixty on the PC over the course of about 5 months and has really amazed me personally in his ability not to lose focus on the music and falling into a technology morass. The chief role of my team at AMD is to work directly with the artist to insure AMD based technology arrives as a solution and not just benchmark or some other nerd synthetic seal of approval. The technology culture left to its own devices actually has the ability to push or steer the artist out of his/her aesthetic pursuits and lead them down an endless technology highway that ends in the nerd cul-de-sac of disappointment. This process transforms the artist into a technologist with his/her aesthetic oftentimes completely destroyed. This is Global Nerding.

Dweezil just won a Grammy® for Peaches En Regalia, which is a live recording of one of Frank Zappa’s most well known compositions. He is someone who understands that technological solutions should be balanced perfectly with the artist’s performance capability. That’s the way we like to approach all of our artists: we try to balance artistic performance with production power. It’s a different way of looking at technology. We measure success based upon what the artist is able to achieve and not just on some nerd technology attribute. Dweezil’s Grammy® is an example of that principle in action. The Digital Media and Entertainment team at AMD has filmed a couple of shows for Dweezil which we’re working on for several DVDs of live ZPZ material. This is an example of how the AMD Digital Media and Entertainment team engages with the artist. We’re out there with them on tour many times testing our technology on the firing line in terms of video, audio, pre-production, and post production. Everyone on my team is an artist first and foremost. We take the customers perspective because we are all actually customers ourselves. We all use AMD technology in our own productions. This is the Fusion culture at AMD.

- Boswell

An Introduction to the Global Nerding Theory

"While Al Gore trots around the globe talking about chemistry and melting glaciers, Boswell unveils a more subtle planetary trend he calls "Global Nerding". The autistic is being cultivated and favored by the macro economics of the computer industry and results are tangible and devastating. The art of human expression is being limited by the technocracy, not enhanced, as Boswell suggests in his Aesthetic Uncertainty Principle. In the aggregate, the current technology culture is medically incapable of empathy with the consumer and Boswell directly relates that to mindblindness or the single unifying characteristic of all forms of autism."

"High technology has been my Galapagos,” says Boswell.

Simply put, Global Nerding is a planetary trend where mankind willingly or unwittingly adapts to technology rather than demand technology adapt to him. In today’s culture, the nerd is the chief arbiter of taste for the neuro-typical or regular user of technology simply because the nerd both creates the technology and is the first to adopt it. Putting it another way, the nerd is in control of the technology. The macro economics of the high technology industry itself is helping to cultivate these “tech savvy” individuals. Global Nerding is my theory on why technology trends toward being almost unusable and certainly non-intuitive at best. Global Nerding also seeks to explain the planetary effects of nerd culture on language and artistic expression. Global Nerding and The Autistic Planet is my book on this topic. I’m first an artist then a technologist. I’ve spent the last ten years working directly with artists utilizing technology. From that experience I synthesized my theory. I choose to view technology as a tool and not as a religion.

Global Nerding is the force by which social intelligence of the planet is being made extinct or dissipated like the glaciers. That’s fine with me because it’s a continuing source of entertaining new material for my music and films. However, as a user of technology, I demand that it pay more reverential respect for the way I work and think. I believe technology needs to respect everyone in the same way.

My theories on Global Nerding in their most elemental form offer the world an explanation, a medical explanation in fact, of why technology is for the most part non-intuitive and arcane. No one should be surprised, especially those of you who have worked in the high-tech industry.

A simplistic example of a subtle effect of Global Nerding is the advent and instantaneous acceptance of MP3. MP3 is a compression technology developed to overcome a technology limitation: storage and bandwidth. It was happily lapped up by teenage America because it allows people to store their vast libraries and share their music. That’s all good, except the fidelity of MP3 is terrible. We willingly traded convenience for quality. I believe it to be a conditioned mindset that has pushed people to make aesthetic judgments based upon only what the technology will allow. I categorically reject that notion. The neuro-typical user says to himself, “I’ve never been this happy, I have 5,000 of these lo-fi recordings and I can share this amazing art with my pals.” I think the same thing can be said about the PC; it’s slow and cumbersome, and we’re saying, "I love this computer because I only had to reset it once today." We must have a very low opinion of ourselves and the technology if we’re in love with this stuff. These kinds of lowered expectations are an effect of Global Nerding.

I believe the “nerderati” have been deciding what I might like and providing these “frameworks” that I utterly reject. I contend that the nerds cannot empathize with end users so their frameworks are flawed and presumptuous. I don’t need frameworks, my framework is infinity, for my mind. Global Nerding itself is a framework, the nerds creating a utopian society for their own kind. I reject both them and their vision.

I grew up in the boyhood home of Walt Disney in the Midwest (Marceline, MO). Walt is known for a number of things, but his most genius legacy is Disneyland. It is a unique model: you don’t see the technology, it’s under the street. Regular people are above the street enjoying the experience while the technology and the technology culture are completely invisible. I am an advocate of Cloud Computing because it will help usher in a Disney-like view of invisible technology. The complexity will vanish in the cloud just like Walt hiding it below the street in Disneyland. The complexity of the technology will reside server-side and the end user experience will become more immersive and interactive with less technology on the client side.

For more information on Global Nerding And The Autistic Planet, check out the Anderson Vision interview.

- Boswell