By Laura Kobylecky

At this 2021 online edition of CES, AMD won an Award and the CEO gave a keynote speech. It’s a big year for the company.

AMD’s “Ryzen 5000 Series desktop processors” won one of this year’s CES “Best of Innovation” Awards. The Innovation Awards are part of an annual competition “honoring outstanding design and engineering in consumer technology products.” The processor is “built on cutting edge ‘Zen 3’ technology, providing unmatched compute power and exceptional performance-per-watt thanks to its ground-breaking 7nm architecture,” according to their CES Innovation Award Profile.

2020 was perhaps one of the most productive years for AMD
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Dr. Lisa Su, President and Chief Executive Officer of AMD (Advanced Micro Devices), showed up to give the keynote speech. She spoke about how technology has been changed by the pandemic, as well as AMD’s newest projects and some of their collaborations with other companies.

Dr. Lisa Su’s presentation started with the standard “Dramatic Tech Video” of a diverse group of people using AMD technology for work and play.

Zoom users are approaching three and a half trillion minutes of meetings per year
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Her intro touches base with the current state of the world. She says that “2020 was perhaps one of our most productive years.” The increased dependence on technology in a socially-distant world accelerated “the pace of our digital transformation.” We have “transitioned to the new normal.”

One example she presents is the rise in video collaboration. She explains that “Zoom users are approaching three and a half trillion minutes of meetings per year. Cisco Webex meeting participants recently hit 600 million per month and Microsoft Teams is now supporting 115 million daily users.” This is only one example of many, but it showcases how “the pandemic has elevated technology to become an essential part of how we live, work, play and communicate.”

Naturally, this transformation has placed “significantly higher demands on our digital infrastructure.” She explains that “at the center of all this technology is high-performance computing”

Microsoft and Gaming

She brings up a live video of Panos Panay, chief product officer of Microsoft. She mentions that they have been collaborating over Microsoft Teams and so he seems very familiar to her, despite having not met in “real life” during this time. Panay talks about how he has been “learning to work differently” in a world where a meeting might include the sound of his dogs “barking in the background.”

He believes that “PC is becoming more essential.” It has expanded beyond “a productivity tool” into something that is used “to connect with other humans and people in general.” He aspires to “help tech disappear into the background,” as they move forward and “continue to push the boundaries.”

Cisco Webex meeting participants recently hit 600 million per month and Microsoft Teams is now supporting 115 million daily users
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The increased dependence on technology in a socially-distant world accelerated the pace of digital transformation as we have transitioned to the new normal
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They also discuss Microsoft’s gaming partnership with AMD. Panay states that “AMD’s momentum right now is incredible” and he describes their partnership as “two teams coming together.” AMD has created “high-performace CPUS and GPUs for the x box series x and series S.”

Another AMD innovation that will be helpful to gaming is the “AMD ryzen 5000 series mobile processors powered by our new zen 3 core.” AMD Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 “increases our lead in overall performance and energy efficiency and also delivers the best single threaded performance,” according to Su. This should lead to more powerful laptop gaming or any other creative uses.

AMD expects “more than 150 ultrathin gaming and professional notebooks powered by Ryzen 5000 series to launch this year.” The first are anticipated to go on sale in February. As a result, AMD will have “ultrathin notebooks all the way up to super computers” with extremely high levels of performance.

Lucasfilm and AMD

The next guest to appear on a video screen is Francois Chardavoine, VP of Technology at Lucasfilm. Su explains that that Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Lucasfilm and AMD have worked together “for more than a decade” and that they were “an early adopter of AMD EPYC ThreadRipper.”

Chardavoine says that, recently, demand has been on the rise for video entertainment so “content creation is through the roof.” They have “built an entirely new studio from scratch in Sydney, Australia.” One very important part of the facility is “the render farm.” The render farm is where they have the computing “firepower that creates all of the images that you see on screen.”

The pandemic has elevated technology to become an essential part of how we live, work, play and communicate
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Software is being designed to take full advantage of processing “firepower in a way that software never has before
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The Sydney, facility will be exclusively AMD. Chardavoine explains that they chose AMD because “we just need as much firepower as possible” and “the amount of threads and cores that you have available is unprecedented and this really helps us deliver the content that we have.” He explains that current software is being designed to take full advantage of that “firepower” “in a way that software never has before.” The artists can make changes and see immediate results leading to a more “intuitive sense of what they are working on.

Overall, there’s a lot happening for this company. People are increasingly dependent on their home computer setup and that benefits companies like this. Their Innovation Award and partnerships may be good signs for their immediate future. It seems like they have an interesting year coming up and it should be exciting to see how that works out for them and what they bring to the table next year.

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Laura Kobylecky is a contributing writer to Tech Trends. She is particularly interested in new and emerging technology and culture. Connect with her on LinkedIn 

The post AMD Keynote at #CES2021 appeared first on Tech Trends.

The National Association of Broadcasters’ Show (NAB) was packed with announcements around VR, AR and MR this year as major industry players brought out the big guns in a bid to stake their claim in this booming market.

One notable example of this is Nokia, which wants to establish itself as the go-to platform for professional content producers in that space by setting a new standard for the creation, delivery and experience of immersive content:

“We believe in the power of virtual reality to transform the human experience. Together, these announcements advance our commitment to empower storytellers to create immersive experiences, enable partners to deliver them efficiently, and ensure audiences can play back experiences in the highest quality possible in ways that transform and awe,” a company spokesperson told Tech Trends.

Some of the key initiatives the company unveiled at NAB 2017 included a high profile partnership with Disney and Lucasfilm to let fans “feel the force of VR like never before.”

NAB was packed with announcements around VR, AR and MR this year
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Image Courtesy of Nokia ©Lucasfilm and Disney

The company announced a multi- year agreement to support the creation of VR experiences to complement Disney’s theatrical film releases. The first one of these will bring VR storytelling Star Wars: The Last Jedi

“We’re thrilled that Star Wars fans around the world will soon be transported into the incredible worlds depicted in the story, to truly feel the power of The Force together.”

Nokia believes that such compelling content is fundamental to driving adoption of virtual and mixed reality, yet creators often face the choice between the ability to develop and distribute that content and delivering high quality. They believe their new OZO Reality Platform solves these issues by enabling professionals to blend VR and mixed reality through easy capture and export of depth maps, allowing for CGI elements to be seamlessly integrated in post-production.

Nokia announced high-profile VR and MR partnerships with Disney and Adobe
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Nokia wants to enable creators to easily produce high-quality VR content
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It delivers this content over real-world networks, and its SDK and OZO Audio technology enables viewers to experience high resolution 360-degree spatial audio and visual while reducing the load on viewers’ Internet connection without VR equipment.

“Together, the Platform offers the complete pipeline across creation, distribution and experience for powerful virtual and mixed reality storytelling,” they claim

They are also keen to democratise the process of VR and MR content creation by making it easier and more accessible. This took shape in the announcement of a collaboration with Adobe, which promises to “take the complexity out of editing 360 VR immersive content.”

At NAB, they previewed technology that showed the possibilities that come with exporting stitched media and orientation metadata directly into Adobe® Premiere® Pro CC for editing and post-production work.

Nokia says its seamless process and comprehensive-yet-simple workflow was a big hit with the NAB crowd
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For help getting your own VR/AR/MR project off the ground, get in touch about our Virtual Reality Consultancy services 

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post #NABShow 2017: Nokia Brings VR Storytelling to Star Wars appeared first on Tech Trends.