Amazon Web Services just announced that they are going to offer clustered cloud-based GPU power to the masses. While this doesn’t really affect video gamers at this very moment, it does have some massive potential once companies start figuring out how to utilize it.
Amazon Web Service announced Amazon Cluster GPU Instances, a new instance type 
designed to deliver the power of GPU processing in the cloud. GPUs are increasingly being used to accelerate the performance of many general purpose computing problems.
Amazon Cluster GPU Instances provide developers and businesses immediate access to the highly tuned compute performance of GPUs with no upfront investment or long-term commitment. To get started using Amazon EC2 GPU Instances, visit: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/hpc-applications/.
Amazon Cluster GPU Instances provide , and utilize the Amazon EC2 Cluster network, which provides high throughput and low latency for HPC and data intensive applications. Each GPU instance features two NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs, delivering peak performance of more than one trillion double-precision FLOPS. Many workloads can be greatly accelerated by taking advantage of the parallel processing power of hundreds of cores in the new GPU instances. Numerous industries – including oil and gas exploration, graphics rendering and engineering design – are using GPU processors to improve the performance of their critical applications.
Sure, this technology is mainly aimed at things like real-time medical imaging, and all those really awesome video things you see on shows like CSI, Fringe, etc. But with the rise of video game on-demand streaming it could mean that you can some some seriously great graphics on computers with far less GPU power than previously required. If the Games-on-demand guys are smart they will take a look into how to utilize this and start bending it to their will. Other areas where this could really help is in video processing, motion-capture and pretty much any Internet-connected video-related functions.
If the future of gaming truly is cloud-based requiring less investment on the part of the gamer, that sounds like a cool thing to me. Almost all of us have full-time Internet broadband connections and something like this could really boost gaming one day...soon.
Prev: 
Next: 
