Interview: AMD on Mantle: We want our graphics API to become the industry standard

Mantle has been a story of fits and starts. But with this week's release of the Catalyst 14.1 beta driver and a pair of game patches, AMD's vision for a low-level, graphics-boosting API is finally starting to take flight.

There's plenty of work to be done - the driver is still in beta, after all - but with its release, the effects of Mantle can be implemented by anyone who likes (albeit with some limitations).

Mantle's benefits are promising, but right now its dependence on Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture keeps it well within AMD's gates. With the company's talk of Mantle improving PC gaming not only for game makers, but for those who play them too, we wanted to know whether AMD would ever open the API to other companies, including its fiercest rivals.

The answer, it turns out, is yes.

Mantle, or something like it

AMD told TechRadar that it'd be willing to make Mantle, or an API based on it, available across the industry. Even, the company said, if it means Mantle is adopted by competitors like Nvidia.

"Mantle for now is straight up in a closed ecosystem, a closed beta, which you have to do in a complicated project like this to get it off the ground. It's us and a few key game developers," Robert Hallock, technical communications, AMD Graphics & Gaming, told us in a recent interview.

"After that phase is done, we do hope that Mantle becomes an industry standard. We'll be releasing a public SDK later this year, and hope that others adopt it. If they don't adopt it itself, then we hope they adopt APIs similar to it that become an industry standard for PC gaming."

How open can you go?

It's a nice sentiment, but does that mean AMD is willing to allow an entity traditionally viewed from behind enemy lines make use of Mantle?

"It's hard to say," Hallock said. "If we want it to be an industry-wide API or inspire an industry-wide API, that would mean adoption from Nvidia in some way, shape or form. I can't speak from an architectural level what that would require of them to change."

"But for the good of gamers, [we] would want one ultimate specification that is either Mantle itself or one similar to it. As Highlander said, 'There can only be one.'"

We asked Nvidia for its thoughts on Mantle and whether it would ever consider adopting the API, but were told that since Mantle isn't open and the company has never seen it, it couldn't comment.

Hallock explained that while it's currently dependent on GCN, Mantle "utilizes a certain level of meaningful hardware abstraction that could eventually allow it to be applicable to other architectures."

"Such applicability," he continued, "is necessary in an ecosystem we hope to grow as an industry standard in the years ahead."

PC thumbprint

AMD has maintained that Mantle will succeed because it was built with the in-put of game developers who wanted to nab better graphics performance with minimal overhead from the machines running their titles.

Hallock relayed some of the feedback developers have had around Mantle, and while he revealed it takes devs longer to bring up a game using the API, the perks quickly become evident.

"It's sort of a simpler, more obvious API with really robust error and obstruction tools," he said. "[Developers] can see what's going wrong [as they develop a game], and it saves time for them."

DICE was the first game dev on the good ship Mantle, but Oxide, Cloud Imperium, and Eidos-Montreal have since jumped on board. Hallock couldn't name future game developers who will join the Mantle march, but said AMD expects more will be announced as the year goes on.

And though a Mantle-enabled Battlefield 4 was supposed to be the API's big coming out party late last year, a hold-up on EA's end pushed back the release.

"We were all a little disappointed," Hallock said of the BF4 delay. "I think we all wanted it to come out in December, but software is a fickle thing. It's unfortunate, but in the grand scheme it's not a big blow. People will be happy and appreciate the extra time that was invested. It is what it is for us."

EA pushed out its Mantle renderer for BF4 last week, and in announcing the release, Frostbite Technical Director Johan Andersson wrote that thanks to the API, "we've significantly reduced CPU cost in our rendering, efficiently parallelized it over multiple CPU cores and reduced overhead in many areas," in addition to improvements to the GPU workload.

That, it seems, would be music to Hallock's ears.

"We hope to put our thumbprint on the industry to show that these lower level APIs for mid-range CPUs is the right way to do it on the PC," he said during our interview. Time, and more games, will tell if that thumbprint sticks.

• AMD and Nvidia are tackling FPS, but in distinctly different ways

industry voice: Designing a network that delivers a hyper-connected Olympic experience

Dean Frohwerk, Olympic Architecture Solution Leader, Avaya, is part of the team responsible for delivering the communications network for the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games. In a series of posts, live from the 'coalface' in Sochi, he will be sharing with us the challenges involved in creating the network.

"With the Winter Olympics now under way, teams, officials, volunteers and media have filled the Sochi Olympic Village. As they walk around, chatting in their various languages, they are carrying tablets, smart phones and other devices. Watching them, I am struck by what a hyper-connected generation we have become.

Just four years ago, at the time of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, netbooks were still in fashion, Android phones were just beginning to dent the smartphone market and social media was much less important. Most people didn't use Twitter and a social media presence wasn't a 'must' for all businesses.

Fast forward four years to today and the world is a very different place. According to Ofcom, in the last two years alone, smartphone ownership in the UK has doubled. Tablets have soared in popularity too: over 25% of UK households now own at least one.

Our embracing of smart devices and applications, coupled with our love to share, has made us a generation that expects to be able to communicate not just anytime and anywhere, but all the time, everywhere. We want to be hyper-connected.

BYOD for the Olympic family

Our desire for hyper connectivity is making its presence felt at the Winter Olympics too. The 40,000 predicted users of the Games network - made up of teams, volunteers, officials and the media - are all likely to have brought with them more than one bandwidth-hungry device, which they will expect to work seamlessly, wherever on the Olympic site they are. It's BYOD on a massive scale.

In order to build a network to cope with this, we drew on our experience with BYOD implementations for large, multi-site enterprises. For example, an enterprise BYOD network is capable of identifying and granting access to a range of user groups while concurrently ensuring stable, secure bandwidth.

The Games network does this too, using a tool that assigns network access rights and permissions based on a user's credentials and role (media, athlete, IOC official), where they connect from (Olympic village, competition venues, etc.) and how they connect. Users are then placed securely into the network with a pre-determined level of service.

Olympics go wireless

All these devices communicating over the network creates a lot of traffic. During the Games period we expect at least 1-2 terabytes of data a day, similar to the usage of a small city! In Vancouver in 2010, wired traffic outnumbered wireless by a factor of 4-to-1. In Sochi, the ratio is expected to be reversed, with Wi-Fi traffic being the main form of access. These Games should are unique in the way that the network is largely wireless, for the first time ever.

All this connectivity means we have come to expect lots of information, almost instantaneously. Meeting this expectation has led to another Sochi network first - these are the first Olympic Games to deploy IPTV technology. The IPTV network provides onsite coverage for the Olympic family (teams, media, officials and volunteers).

Approximately 1,500 television screens across all the venues - including the Olympic Village - are broadcasting 36 HD IPTV channels over the IPTV network to the Olympic family, and we expect this to have a huge impact on their experience of the Games.

For example, a journalist watching the figure skating live in the Bolshoy Dome will be able to also watch the downhill skiing, simultaneously, on HDTV. Or a photographer has instant upload access to thousands of photos from wireless-enabled cameras, from the moment an athlete crosses the finish line. The IPTV channels provide fast, reliable access no matter where he is uploading from.

We have become a race of always-connected, information hungry people and the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games are a reflection of this, largely thanks to its network - custom-built for a high-tech, hyper-connected generation."

Next week, in my final post in this series, I will be looking at what businesses can learn from the Olympic network deployment.

May on 4K: Can 4K save the struggling TV industry?

Will 4K Ultra HD be the saviour of the beleaguered TV industry?

Increasingly, that's how some executives seem to be painting it.

Despite having next to no native 4K content to drive sales, upbeat analysts seem to be revising their market expectations upwards on a monthly basis.

Speaking at its recent European product forum, Samsung Euro Chief Sunny Lee proclaimed the 4K TV market was set for "explosive growth."

It'll be 14x bigger this year than last, he enthused. By 2017, Lee predicts annual European shipments of 4K TVs will hit 3.3m sets.

The CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) seems equally optimistic, estimating that in the US 485,000 screens will ship this year, generating $1 billion in revenue for the first time.

Apparently 73 per cent of US adults who see a 4K TV in store want one. Ka-ching!

The market seers at Futuresource Consulting note that our increasing love of large tellies (and by that they mean 45-inches plus), will account for 23 per cent of the market by 2017, and by then pretty much all will be 2160p. So the future's looking rosey, right?

It's the penguins, stupid

The hard truth is that TV has turned into a penguin business, i.e. it's unlikely to fly again, despite huge technology leaps.

Sony's recent announcement that it's hiving out its TV division into a wholly owned company says it all.

Unable to deliver on a promised return to profitability (on the bright side, the group will only lose 25 billion yen this year), it's being set up as a fiefdom.

Given Sony's aggressive restructuring plans, things could have been worse. It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that Kaz Hirai could have pulled the plug on TV completely as he did with Vaio.

Thankfully, the CEO believes the sector is "still important," probably because it's more synergistic than Vaio to the rest of the Sony portfolio.

It's undoubtedly a shrewd move. With Sony TV a separate entity, it becomes far less toxic to Sony Corp, and could possibly reap dividends in any potential sale (not that that's being mooted).

The good news for the rest of us and indeed, Sony's various global sales operations, is the change really won't have a great deal of impact.

A future for TV

When I reached out for a comment from Sony UK, a spokesperson pointed out that Sony remained committed to increasing its "4K TV options," and there's no slowdown in Full HD TV either.

"In some areas, big screen 2K TVs are still very popular and Sony doesn't have any particular goals to decrease the number of models it offers," I was told.

Sony's stated strategy will be to focus increasingly on high-end screens, both 4K UHD and Full HD. It'll also chase emerging markets. Admittedly this news could set alarm bells ringing; similar noises were heard from Pioneer and Panasonic, and neither of those plans played out particularly well. But I reckon Sony can buck the trend.

Within the corridors of its downsized Tokyo HQ, executives will be buoyed by the news that in its local market at least the company has more than 75 per cent share in UHD TV, and it's dominant Stateside too.

All of which goes some way to explaining Samsung's ambitious curved screen gambit. By making UHD (note that Samsung is downplaying the 4K branding) as much a design choice as a picture quality one, it cleverly mitigates the lack of content argument and encourages trendsetters to upgrade faster than they actually need to. Crafty buggers.

So will 4K save the TV industry? Probably not. But it will stop the business spiralling into a maelstrom of mid-priced cheapies distinguished only by the amount of club card points they accrue when thrown into the weekly shopping basket. And for that we should all be 8 million pixels grateful.