 Okay, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are at George Watkins, the product marketing manager, cloud gaming and visual cloud at AMD. George, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, thank you for having me. Love this segment, accelerating game development at AWS cloud, big topic on how the gaming developer environment is changing and how AMD is powering it. Let's get into it. So streaming remote, working remote, flexible collaboration, all powered by the G4AD virtual workstations has been a big part of success. Take us through what's going on there. Yeah, certainly. So obviously from a remote working perspective, there was a huge impact on collaboration and productivity for many industries out there. But a collaborative environment like game design, it was even more so. So first off, having to have these big bulky workstationship to local artists so they can actually carry on working was a massive nightmare for IT management. Making sure that they have the right hardware, the right resources, the right applications and security. So it was a real mean task. And on top of that, work remotely also brings in other efficiencies when it comes to collaboration. So for example, working on a data set, as I mentioned before, it's a huge team collaboration effort when it comes to game development and using the same data set happens very, very often. So if you're actually working remotely and an artist, for example, pulled a data set from a server, worked on it, then took it back up into the cloud, I'll tell you now, it takes some time to do. And at the same time, you might have one or two other artists trying to use that data set. The problem or the big issue that comes here is version control. And essentially because these artists are using the older version, there's creating errors, they're actually keeping their production time longer. So it's very, very inefficient. And this is where the cloud really comes to its own. First off, the cloud, and then obviously in this case, the AWS cloud with G4AD instances, really does bring the whole pipeline together. It brings the data sets and the virtual workstations. Obviously, as I mentioned, G4AD, as well as all the applications into one place. It's all centralized. And from an IT perspective, this is fantastic. And actually sending out a workstation now is really, really simple. It's logging details into an email to your new staff. And there's some really great benefits as well from a staff perspective. Not only are they not tethered to a local workstation, they have the flexibility of work where they need to and also how they like to. But it's also really interesting about how they work on a day to day basis. So a good example of this is if a artist is using or working on a very, very heavy data set and the configuration from their VM or virtual workstation isn't up to snuff because of such a large data set. All they need to do is call up IT and say, I need more resource. And literally in a couple of minutes time, they can actually have that resource and again, improve in that productivity, reduce in that time. So it's really, really important. And just a final note here as well, with having all that data and all that resource in the cloud, version control tools really do help bring that efficiency as it's all built into the applications and that data set to really, really exciting stuff. And ultimately, bring in that productivity and reducing that time and error is down. Yeah, I can see your point too, because when you don't bring it to the cloud, people are going to be bored waiting for the things to happen. And they say, I want to take a shortcut. Shortcuts equal mistakes. So I can see that the G4AD with virtual workstations is cool because it's purpose built for what you're talking about. So take me through how you see the improved efficiencies in the development pipeline with cloud computing around this area because obviously it makes a lot of sense. Everything's in the cloud. You got the instances there. Now what happens next? How does the coding all work? What's going on around the game development pipeline? Yeah, so 3D applications today, particularly that used in the gaming industry, I'll be honest, they are still based on legacy hardware. And what I mean by this is that the applications typically require higher CPU hertz. They are typically single-threaded. Maybe some kind of multi-threaded functionality there. But generally, they are limited by what the traditional workstation has been. And obviously, why not? I mean, they've been built over the last 10, 15 years to access that type of data. Now that is all great, but it's not accessing what could be all the resources that are available in the cloud. And this is what's really, really exciting in my part. So ultimately, what we're saying is that you have this great virtual workstation experience. You have all your applications running on there. You can be efficient, but then there's these really specific and really interesting use cases that are accessed in the cloud. And I've got a couple of examples. So first off, there's a feature inside Unreal 4 engine called Unreal Swarm. And this feature helps actually reduce the time it takes, in this case, to bake lightmaps into auto scale, to bake lightmaps into a game. And this is done by auto-scaling the compiling in AWS cloud. So for example, after making the amends to a lightmap, we're ready to essentially recompile, but instead of doing this on a local workstation using the traditional CPU and memory resource, which you would expect to see in a workstation. And actually, in this case, it took around about 50 minutes to do. When you actually use Unreal Swarm, you can assume the coordinator as part of this functionality bursts the requirement for the actual compiling into the cloud. And actually, in this case, it's using like 10 C5A instances. So these are all CPU, high-performance computing instances. And because you have this ability to auto-scale, you actually essentially bring that time, that original 50 minutes, down to four minutes. And this type of functionality or this type of task that you would typically see with a 3D artist or with a programmer basically happens multiple times a day. So when you start factoring in a saving of 45 minutes, multiple times a day, it starts really bringing down the amount of time saved and obviously the amount of cost saved as well for that artist's time. So it's really, really exciting and certainly something to talk about. Yeah, I mean, that's totally cool. And I got to ask you since you're here because it brings up the question that pops on my head, which is, okay, what's the state of the art development trends that you're seeing because on the cloud side, on non-gaming world, it's, oh, shift left for security. So you start to see more agile kind of methods around what used to be different modules, right? So you mentioned compiling and acceleration. What's going on in the actual workflows for the developers? What are some of the cool things that you can share that people might not know about that are important? Well, certainly it's really about finding those bursty computational, expensive and time-consuming processes and actually moving them to the cloud. So really from a compiling standpoint, they are usually CPU bound. So essentially the GPU does all the work when it comes to the viewport, all that high rendering frames per second, that's what it's really designed for. And it does a very good job of that. But actually the compiling aspect, the compute aspect is all done on the CPU side. And the work that we've been doing with AWS and the Game Tech team is actually finding certain ways of actually helping to reduce the compiling nature because ultimately that is always restricted by the amount of cores that you actually have on a local device. So again, another example is there's a company out there called Incredibilt and they specialize in accelerating the development of that programming code. And obviously in this case, it's the game code. And if an artist did a clean source code build on Unreal Engine 4, it would take approximately around about 60 minutes to do on a local machine. However, using the Incredibilt solution to accelerate that type of workload, it can complete it in just six minutes. Because again, it's auto-scaled out that compiling to several, in this case 16 C5A large instances, which essentially reduces all that time for the artist, freeing them up to do more stuff. Yeah, and the more creativity, it's just a classic use case of the cloud, it's a beautiful thing. It just reminds me of how good this is because, I mean, think about what you guys are doing, pushing the envelope, but for a lot of the creators, I mean, gaming is such a state of the art pressure point to make my performance come better. So, I mean, it really is putting a lot of pressure on AMD and everyone else is to get faster and stronger because it truly is pushing state of the art in general. It's always been that way. If you look at the gaming world, this is a whole nother level. I mean, you're starting to see that. What's your view on that? I mean, if you look at the gaming as a tell sign for the trends in the tech side, better, faster, cheaper processors and speeds and feeds and how code's working between processors, GPUs and CPUs, all this is cool, all kind of new, if you will, and new patterns, new usage. What's your view on that? Well, certainly, cloud gaming is a really exciting topic and we believe that cloud gaming with the introduction of various key elements are really revolutionized the way that people are actually using gaming and playing and interacting with games. And what I mean by this is like, today we can do cloud gaming. It's a fantastic experience. You're usually hardwired using a broadband connection to actually play those games and you tend to try and be close to an actual data center to actually reduce that latency. However, this is only going to get better with the introduction of 5G coverage and also just as important edge computing. And because of these two elements, what we're going to be seeing is very high speeds wirelessly and more importantly, low latency. And this is very important for that very dynamic, cinematic gaming experiences. But not only this, what it can actually do is bring 4K, 8K gaming to people wirelessly. It can also bring VR and AR experiences wirelessly. And also it can access these new emerging technologies that are making higher fidelity gaming experiences like hardware rate tracing. All this can be done with these new technologies and it's incredibly incredibly exciting. But more importantly, what's really great about this is from a game publisher perspective because it's actually helping them simplify their business processes, particularly from a game development standpoint. And actually what I mean by this is if we take a typical example of what a game developer has to do for a mobile game, there's certain considerations that they need to think about when they actually comes to developing and validate it. So first off, they'll have to understand what type of OS to count for and actually what type of version of that OS to count for, what type of IPA that they're going to be building on. And also finally, what type of resources are actually on that endpoint device? So there's a lot of considerations here and a lot of testing. So ultimately a lot of work to get that game out to those gamers who might be on a couple of these different mobile platforms. However, when it comes to game streaming, it really does kind of change all this because ultimately what the game developer is actually doing is that they're developing and they're validating on one source and that is going to be the server that is essentially powering that game streaming service because how game streaming works is that we essentially transcode the actual game via H.264 to a software client on any endpoint device. So this can be those mobile devices that I just mentioned. It can also be TVs, it can be consoles, it can be even low-powered laptops. And what's very exciting is that from an end user perspective, they're getting the ultimate in gaming experiences and usually these types of solutions are traditionally subscription based. So you're actually reducing the requirement of this kind of high-end thousands of dollars gaming solution or simply a high-end next-gen console. All of this has actually been given to you and delivered as part of a game streaming service. So it's very, very exciting. And certainly we can see the adoption on both the game development side as well as the gamer side. Yeah, that's great. And that's a great way to put an end to this awesome segment. I think that business model innovation around making it easier and making it better to develop environment. That's just how they work. So that's good, check. But really the business model here, the gaming as a service, you're making it possible for the developer and the artist to see an outcome faster. That's the cloud way. And they double down on success and they can do that. So again, this is all new and exciting. And certainly the edge in having data being processed at the edge as well. Again, all this is coming and going to create more good to George. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing that insight with us from the AMD perspective. And again, more power, more speed, we always say, bring on the, no one's going to complain if they get more compute. That's what I always say. So, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, it's Cube coverage here to AWS re-invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.