AMD and an equally ambitious Hollywood-type outfit called OTOY are proposing to push HD content through a so-called AMD Fusion Render Cloud, a massively parallel supercomputer said to be unlike any other ever built.

The widgetry is being designed to break the one petaFLOPS barrier and process a million compute threads across more than 1,000 graphics processors.

When finished, it should be the fastest graphics supercomputer ever and be powered by OTOY software.

The behemoth is due to be operational in the second half. Well, maybe a beta. It wants to support a million users (someday).

Announced late Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, AMD said content providers will use the beast to deliver video games, PC applications and other graphically intense applications through the cloud to virtually any type of mobile device with a web browser - without the device rapidly depleting its battery or struggling to process the content.

AMD and its friends, who include Lucasfilm, Dell, HP and Electronic Arts, imagine Fusion Render Cloud transforming movies and gaming through server-side rendering, which stores visually rich content in the compute cloud, compresses it, and streams it in real-time over a wireless or broadband connection to smart phones, set-top boxes and ultra-thin notebooks.

AMD said that by delivering remotely rendered content to devices that can't store and process HD content because of device size, battery capacity and processing power, HD cloud computing can bring HD entertainment to mobile users virtually anywhere.

The AMD Fusion Render Cloud is also supposed to enable remote real-time rendering of film and visual effects graphics on what is called "an unprecedented scale."

Gaming companies could use it to develop and deploy next-generation game content, serve up virtual world games with "unlimited" photorealistic detail and "take advantage of new delivery channels as open and diverse as the web itself."

The trick is apparently in OTOY's server-side HD cloud rendering graphics software and middleware, said to "break through existing CPU-only and graphics processor-only render bottlenecks that have imposed limitations on the creation of true eye-definition assets."

It does what it does by virtue of pre-processing. It's unclear if it can scale.

Explaining Render Cloud's skills, AMD said, "Imagine watching a movie half-way through on your cell phone while on the bus ride home, then, upon entering your home or apartment, switch over to your HD TV and continue watching the same movie from exactly where you left off, seamlessly, and at full-screen resolution. Imagine playing the most visually intensive first-person shooter game at the highest image quality settings on your cell phone without ever having to download and install the software, or use up valuable storage space or battery life with compute-intensive tasks."

Render Cloud is spec'd to use Phenom II processors, AMD 790 chipsets and ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics processors.

AMD called it an example of the Fusion strategy that it went into hock to buy ATI for.