So we've been hearing lots of noise in the recent past about AMD Live! and what it's all about and back at CeBIT 2006 we gave you a run-down on the whole AMD Live! concept. The one (minor) problem I had with the idea was that unless we could get our hands on other media kit that would work with AMD Live!, it made it a bit tricky to see what it could do.
So here I am, writing this piece direct into our content database through Internet Explorer on an AMD Live! machine.
Now, you might not think that this is anything particularly special, but whilst I'm writing this, this self same machine is running two video streams to two separate rooms of the AMD 'house', in fact a quick look over the way tells me that the 'kids' (in this case two rather sullen looking German teenagers) are currently browsing through the available movies on this demo system whilst a rather bemused adult is watching the Fantastic 4 trailer, also streamed from this same machine.
And I'm doing this boring journo stuff and writing about it.
Still, if nothing else, it proves that an AMD Live! spec'd machine is up to the job of running multiple streams and handling multiple apps at once.
The idea is to enable several pieces of home media hardware, such as satellite receivers, DVD players and music players to all work in harmony with each other, allowing you to sahre media across your network. But the clever bit is that the AMD Live! system will figure out which bit of hardware is best used for encoding the media for the output you want to send it to... which, to be honest will normally mean the powerful Athlon 62 X2 processor will do the work, but in some cases it might be the DVD player or satellite decoder...
Safe to say though, that the system so far has held up well and is still streaming nicely... time to run a few 3DMark loops perhaps?
