OTOY, a remote-gaming rival to OnLive, said Wednesday that the AMD-powered Fusion Render Cloud Servers, upon which its service is built, will come to market sometime in the second quarter of 2010.

OTOY, a remote-gaming rival to OnLive, said Wednesday that the AMD-powered Fusion Render Cloud Servers, upon which its service is built, will come to market sometime in the second quarter of 2010.

The servers, originally at the January 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, will make up the hardware infrastructure for the OTOY service, designed to allow games to be remotely played via PCs, without the need for enthusiasts to constantly reinvest in new hardware.

OTOY will compete with OnLive, which on Wednesday as well.

"In 2003 AMD delivered Opteron, ending the sole source enterprise technology barrier," said Charlie Boswell, director of digital media and entertainment at AMD, in a statement. "This forever changed the Internet as providers were allowed to innovate freely. Today AMD's Fusion Render Cloud is igniting the next evolution in cloud computing by enabling server side rendering of fully interactive HD content."

OTOY did not announce details of its service, including service pricing and what it will cost to rent games. But it did disclose the capabilities of the hardware, and at least implied the number of simultaneous users the service will be able to support - which isn't many.

The Fusion Render Cloud hardware will generate 3,000 concurrent HD streams (720p/1080p or higher at 60 Hz, OTOY said) for streaming video games, high end CAD programs and full virtual desktops for all major operating systems, OTOY said. In a press release, OTOY also indicated that its service will supply an additional 12,000 concurrent SD streams at 120 Hz. However, whether those streams will replace the HD streams, as opposed to supplementing them, couldn't be absolutely confirmed.

OTOY did not say how large its potential customer base could be, based on those numbers; since the company's users won't typically log on a 24/7 basis, the number of potential customers should be somewhat larger than its total available concurrent streams.

Neither OTOY nor AMD representatives could be reached for comment at press time.

The compute power available to the OTOY service, via the Fusion Render Cloud servers, will be 1 petaflop of computing power, made up of 125 1U rackmount servers deploying some combination of 500 AMD "Cypress" graphics chips (also known as the Radeon HD 5870)and an additional 250 AMD Opteron G34 "Magny Cours" CPUs. The servers themselves will be designed and built by SuperMicro.

"The launch of the Fusion Render Cloud platform through Supermicro's product line marks a major milestone for cloud computing," said Jules Urbach, OTOY's chief executive, in a statement. "Streaming high performance games and graphics remotely is an indisputably disruptive technical achievement. The very idea has invited both excitement and skepticism during the 14 months since AMD and OTOY announced their plans to enter into this space. With the addition of a major OEM supplying servers to datacenters next quarter, this technology will be commoditized by an ecosystem of partners as diverse as the web itself. The future of graphics in the cloud has never been brighter."

OTOY also did not give any indication on the proximity limits it would impose on its customer base. OnLive has been said to be building three servers across the United States, requiring each user to live within 1,000 miles or face latency, or lag, issues that may degrade game play.