AMD
What does it all mean for gaming platform suppliers?
Jon Jayal, Chief Operating Officer, Quixant, explained to Casino International what makes AMD product right for them – and for their customers.
going to be even better. The casinos want to make things more exciting and even beyond that, there is skill-based gaming to look toward to. You will have an almost videogame- like experience, and for that you really need great graphics. You want near-Xbox quality because you might even be playing a variant of Call of Duty against other people and betting on the outcome. That will bring in a lot of new players, and you will need top graphics. It does feel like there is a big shift happening in the casino market and it will need higher-speed CPUs to deliver. Casino International: What is the AMD Infinity Fabric you mentioned, how does that work and what does it contribute to these great chips? ST: It lets us stitch all these
different processing elements together into a seamless unit that delivers the whole experience – and the programmer can access it through a single programming model. It knits together CPU and GPU and all the I/O so they act as one unit. It’s an interconnect on the device to share data between these in a way that is seamless to all of them. Customers never see it and programmers never access it directly, but it helps everything work together. Casino International: If you look
at a brand-new cabinet – say, for example, IGT’s incredible 4D Sphinx – which has multiple different technologies coexisting as well as the usual architecture, does a game design like that put stress on your creation or is it part of what you’ve built it all for? It has haptic feedback, 3D, multiple screens so it’s a lot going on…
38 MAY 2018 MF: For that specifically, it needs
extra graphics performance because of the stereo screen that creates the 3D. For example, from a regular HD screen you need a graphics performance that’s twice as fast as you would normally. Then you have the haptic controller, and of course there are multiple screens to be run as well. AMD technology seamlessly handles it all. Casino International: What does this mean for the actual casino customer? ST: It’s the highest performance
integrated device we have ever made and that exists in the market. To have it all together in one chip is what’s unique and game-changing about the device. MF: The computer box goes into the slot machine cabinet, and having fewer components makes it easier to design, makes it cheaper with lower power and easier to cool. In terms of the hardware developer, it saves many cycles and headaches as well. It gives a level of performance that would have required external graphics and bigger boxes, external components etc – it’s just all simpler than before. ST: One way to think of this is, if
you have a $150 45-watt processor and a $200 50-100watt graphics card, and you now only pay for one device that is less than 45 watts depending on what you want to do with it. So you’re saving all of that infrastructure, all the dedicated support chips for power and memory, and it’s a huge efficiency gain. MF: A slot machine has hundreds,
maybe a thousand different components and to reduce that number by any significant amount is a godsend in logistics terms.
Casino International: What is it about AMD technology that makes them the right fit for you and your customers? Jon Jayal: We have had a very long tenure with AMD which extends back to the foundations of our business in 2005. All our products have been based on AMD technology to some degree. The important thing is that that is not through anything other than merit. The most important aspect of the computer for the gaming industry is the graphics processor, and AMD has always had a strong capability in graphics that exceeds some of its counterparts. If you look specifically at their graphics capabilities when combined with their CPUs, they are far in excess of competing products. When Quixant was looking for a partner to work with that had a good embedded program, which was suitable in terms of parts, long term availability, and which had products that were aligned with the gaming industry’s needs, AMD was an excellent choice for us. Initially, we looked at who had the best product and discovered not only does AMD have a good product, but we have a relationship that has evolved over the years and it has allowed us to offer our customers great products too – products that we believe are among the best in the market. Our relationship with AMD is entirely based on merit.
Casino International: How much of AMD’s development is influenced by what you feed back to AMD from your customers? JJ: AMD is a big business with a wide variety of markets outside of gaming, but they take the embedded market very seriously. Other companies may not be so receptive to feedback, but AMD has certainly taken into account requirements we have fed back from the gaming industry. Security for example. AMD has introduced the Platform Security Processor on their next generation “Zen” products, and that is definitely of interest to customers in the gaming industry. It’s not only for gaming of course, but it does show they are looking at what our industry needs and listening to their customers.
Casino International: What, from your perspective, does the AMD Ryzen Embedded V1000 processor allow your customers to achieve? What does it improve on? JJ: The most obvious thing is the ability to drive four 4K screens with just the integrated GPU, so the graphics performance on “Zen”-based AMD processors is far in excess of anything else on the market. If someone is looking for a single chip solution to provide four 4K screens with high-quality CPU performance as well, this is really the only available option. That’s exciting because in current times the bill of materials cost of machines is coming under scrutiny. A cost-effective single-chip solution with those qualities is a very attractive offer. It’s fair to say, it’s been quite highly anticipated in the gaming industry and the feedback we have had so far from customers is that it has exceeded expectations.
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