Advanced Micro Devices will have a growing presence at the San Francisco Giant s ball field over the next three years.
Officials with AMD and the Giants announced a multi-year partnership June 26 that will include the baseball team standardizing its customer-facing and corporate computing systems on AMD’s processors, starting with 66 TouchSmart 320m all-in-one (AiO) touch-screen PCs from Hewlett-Packard that are enabling fans to make their votes for the All-Star roster from the stadium.
In addition to the AiOs in the luxury suites, over the course of the partnership, the Giants organization will standardize its front-office operations with AMD-based desktop PCs and notebooks and will add servers powered by AMD s Opteron chips to its data centers.
Until now, the Giants computing systems represented a mix of vendor platforms, including technologies from both AMD and its larger rival, Intel, according to Giants CIO Bill Schlough. However, given the growing trend of more video and graphics crossing the ball club s networks from fans and employees alike, it was important to find the best technology to handle the increasing demand, Schlough said in an interview with eWEEK. AMD has that technology, he said.
“It feels to us that AMD is really positioned well in the areas where we want to innovate,” Schlough said. “That’s in video and graphics.”
He pointed to the perfect game that pitcher Matt Cain threw for the Giants June 13. At the end of the game, fans uploaded more than 70GB onto the stadium’s networks–more than in any of the World Series games the team played in San Francisco in 2010–and the bulk of that was in photos and videos.
That’s part of a larger trend that’s seeing not only fans, but players, coaches and club employees as well demanding a high-quality online experience at AT&T Park that can handle the graphics and video they re using.
AMD in 2006 bought graphics technology vendor ATI for about $5.4 billion, and has since grown its graphics chips capabilities. Last year AMD introduced the first of its accelerated processing units (APUs), which integrated both the CPU and graphics technology onto the same piece of silicon. The company this year is rolling out the next-generation APUs, including its recently released A-Series Trinity chips, which officials said offer greater performance and energy efficiency than previous APUs.
To read the original eWeek article, click here: AMD, San Francisco Giants Partner on Technology for Ballpark