Recently Google had everyone talking following the reveal of Stadia, its upcoming streaming platform. We learned a lot about the company's vision for gaming, but what we didn't get was a lot of hard facts. That said, since the reveal we've been getting a steady trickle of intel. Or not, as the case may be (and pardon the pun).
With that in mind, AMD recently released a press release, detailing their part in the Google Stadia project. Therefore we have a few confirmed facts, and it's clearly stated that the company will be working on the GPU side of things:
"Google selected high-performance, custom AMD Radeon datacenter GPUs for its Vulkan and Linux-based Google Stadia"
This means that Google will try and make the platform as open as possible for developers. The actual hardware will be:
-Second-generation High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) to provide power savings in a compact footprint
-Critical datacenter features such as Error Correcting Code (ECC)1 protection to help ensure data integrity
- Fast, predictable performance with security features for cloud-based gaming, via the industry's first hardware-based GPU virtualisation solution built on industry standard SR-IOV (Single-Root I/O Virtualisation) technology
While it comes as little surprise that HBM2-based GPU will be used, AMD goes on to point out that with a single GPU architecture, both console and PC focused developers are given equal opportunities.
A number of tools are also in the works, including a GPU profiler that "allows game developers to visualize exactly how their application is utilizing the GPU, including how graphics and compute thread groups occupy the GPU. Developers are then able to track event timing and optimize their games for Google Stadia."
The focus on the GPU aspect also heavily implies that Intel will most likely be responsible for the CPU in the datacenters, despite the conspicuous lack of an official mention of Intel in Google's marketing so far. However, the specific inclusion of Hyperthreading by the company, which is proprietary Intel tech, seems to all but confirm their involvement. Maybe they didn't get around to crossing the t's and dotting the lower case j's ahead of the big reveal?!