Supercharge Your Creative Workflow - See how AMD boosts the quality and performance experience on Adobe Photoshop® CC and Adobe Premiere® Pro CC

Supercharge Your Creative Workflow - See how AMD boosts the quality and performance experience on Adobe Photoshop® CC and Adobe Premiere® Pro CCAMD is a sponsor of this year’s Adobe MAX, The Creative Conference in Los Angeles (May 4-8) where we are pleased to announce continued collaboration with Adobe to boost quality and performance of new and enhanced features in the latest versions of both Adobe Photoshop CC and Adobe Premiere Pro CC, by leveraging the massive compute horsepower in AMD APUs, AMD RadeonTM HD graphics, and AMD FireProTM Professional graphics. By continuing to use an open standard, cross-platform approach with OpenCL™ and OpenGL, coupled with the affordable and flexible licensing terms of Adobe’s Creative Cloud membership, Adobe is bringing the benefits of acceleration in its flagship products to a broad range of PC form factors for all types of users.  Now that Adobe and AMD have shattered the cost and performance barriers, any creative pro or consumer can access the tools needed to follow their dreams. Last month at NAB 2013, I posted a blog highlighting AMD and Adobe’s announcementon expanded OpenCL support for Premiere Pro, including multi-stream and mixed-format accelerated workflows with real-time effects, color grading, and finishing with hardware-accelerated rendering to the chosen final destination format. Today AMD has more good news: Premiere Pro offers even more OpenCL-accelerated features, including the following: OpenCL hardware-powered rendering with Adobe Media Encoder. Users can queue up multiple Premiere Pro projects to be rendered using all of the available GPU horsepower in the background. Multi-GPU support. Users with multiple AMD graphics devices in their PC can achieve fast render results by leveraging all of their GPUs.The latest version of Adobe Photoshop adds new and enhanced features on top of the dozens of existing open hardware-accelerated features. Adobe Photoshop’s impressive list of GPU-accelerated features now includes the following:An all-new, higher-quality Smart Sharpen filter. The new Smart Sharpen filter leverages OpenCL and AMD graphics technology to sharpen images faster1 while minimizing halo effects on distinct edges and providing precise noise reduction control.An enhanced Blur Gallery. The Blur Gallery now harnesses the power of AMD graphics technology to deliver mouse-down previews quickly, accurately, and in high on-screen resolution of up to a million pixels. This high-quality, instant on-screen feedback allows artists to work more efficiently without unnecessary disruptions to their creative workflow. Non-destructive hardware accelerated Blur Gallery effects are applied as as Smart Objects to create a desired look for images and even video within Photoshop CC. Faster Liquify. Performance enhancements made to the Liquify effect  so that creative professionals can now push, pull, rotate, reflect, pucker, or bloat selected image areas to achieve unique artistic effects with greater speed2 while working with even the largest images. And now with the added Smart Object support, you can create, edit, and maintain a specific look without having to ever start over. Both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro fully support advanced display technologies, such as 4K and AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology. If you are at Adobe MAX this year, please come check us out (Booth #115). See www.amd.com/adobe for updated information about AMD and Adobe. With Adobe Creative Cloud, a simple monthly membership gives you the complete collection of Adobe creative desktop applications. Along with cloud storage, Creative Cloud members automatically get access to new tools and product updates as soon as they’re released.For more information about AMD PerformanceDetails about AMD and AdobeFor more information about AMD FirePro™ GraphicFind more great apps accelerated by AMD at www.amd.com/appzoneFor more information about AdobeFor more information about AMDClarice Simmons is a Senior Marketing Manager at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied
1 - AMD tests are performed on optimized AMD reference systems. PC manufacturers may vary configuration yielding different results.  Test project used the new “Smart Sharpen” effect with Adobe Photoshop CC pre-release build, version 1.0.0.157 from 4/23/2013, test image: 5616x3744, 60.2MB, .PSD format.  A notebook PC with AMD A10-5850M APU with AMD Radeon™ HD 8650G Graphics, 2x2GB DDR3-800 RAM, video driver 12.105.0.0 - 07-Apr-2013, SSD hard drive and Window 8 Professional (x64) build 9200 took 14.84 seconds with GPU acceleration on versus 31.03 seconds with GPU acceleration off.  RIN-272- AMD tests are performed on optimized AMD reference systems. PC manufacturers may vary their configuration yielding different results. Test project used the new “Liquify” effect with Adobe Photoshop CC pre-release build, version 1.0.0.157 from 4/23/2013 compared to the original “Liquify” in Photoshop CS6 released in May 2012, test image: 5616x3744, 60.2MB, .PSD format, on a notebook PC with AMD A10-4600M APU with AMD Radeon™ HD 7660G Graphics, 2x2GB DDR3-1600 RAM, SSD hard drive and Window 8 Professional (x64) build 9200. he original “Liquify” effect (with video driver: 8.981.0.0 - 06/20/2012) took 7.47 seconds and the new “Liquify” effect (with video driver: 9.17.10.2932 - 2/12/2012) took 36.67 seconds.  RIN-28

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Synchronous mirroring with DataCore boosts telecom's DR strategy

When Chris Jones, manager of IT services at Blair, Neb.-based Great Plains Communications Inc., sought to improve his disaster recovery strategy, he knew exactly what he needed: synchronous mirroring of data hosted at two locations approximately 10 miles from each other. He also knew that he wanted to keep his storage array, even if it didn't support synch mirroring.

The independent local exchange service communications company has about 50 TB of storage, nearly all of which is virtualized through 200 virtual servers and 200 virtual desktops. Jones set about investigating options for synchronous mirroring capabilities, and said he learned quickly that "only the large manufacturers had that ability."

Jones's shop was running an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN array. "It was a very nice storage box," he said. "We didn't want to pull it out of service early." With VMware ESX and vMotion running at both locations, he wanted a way to balance workloads dynamically between the two data centers without buying a new storage system.

"DataCore [Software] had this offering that you could layer on top [of our existing system]," Jones said. He purchased DataCore's SANsymphony-V storage, virtualization software billed by the vendor as having the ability to auto-tier and manage storage in enterprises using incompatible devices from multiple suppliers. SANsymphony-V's feature list includes synchronous mirroring, disk pooling, high-speed caching and RAID pooling, among others. "We saw some pretty good performance improvement through [DataCore's] caching technology," Jones said. "Our primary interest was in the mirroring."

According to Jones, "If I did have storage failure, which has occurred, everything would fail over [to the other DataCore node.] Should one of those storage systems fail, the VMs [virtual machines] immediately fail over to the remote storage system and retain their operational store. At that point, you would be looking at recovering from a snapshot or, heaven forbid, you actually go back to backup these days." That means "all our VMs reside in two storage systems at any given time," he said.

SANSymphony-V enabled Jones to "break out of a single-layer approach. We no longer have to buy big, complex systems. We can buy an x86 off the shelf and DataCore adds all the SAN technologies on top of that."

DataCore's tiering works similarly to that of Dell's Compellent Data Progression, EMC's FAST VP, Hewlett-Packard's 3PAR Adaptive Optimization, Hitachi Data Systems' Dynamic Tiering and IBM's System Storage Easy Tier. But among those vendors, only Hitachi supports arrays outside of its own. SANsymphony-V's tiering works across any storage device.

Jon Toigo, CEO and managing principal at Toigo Partners International, runs DataCore in his own environment and tells IT customers to look at DataCore to avoid "buying feature-encrusted gear that jacks up the price.

"DataCore can overlay on top of anything that connects to the server and manage it all as one pool," Toigo said. "It leverages all the load balance, receives all the writes into memory on the server and writes to non-volatile RAM. The system thinks your storage is four times faster because it's going down to RAM."

Toigo noted, however, "I don't want to overstate one thing. You don't have management of the underlying infrastructure -- you have management of the services provided by storage. Storage arrays are prone to failures much more than people realize; the interconnects, fans, power surges, all of that can fail."

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