Winner announced: AMD What Would You Do with 48 Cores? Contest

As you may know, AMD hosted the “What Would You Do with 48 Cores?” contest in conjunction with the company’s Magny-Cours launch last month. AMD promised to award one winner with four new AMD Opteron processors, a TYAN S8812 motherboard and a copy of Windows Server 2008 (value: approx $8K). All that was asked was the participants share their creative essays, videos, or blog posts to document how they might use 48 cores to make the world a better and more interesting place.



After digging through more than 840 entries, yesterday AMD announced the winner of the contest along with two runners-up and a couple of comical entries that just couldn’t go unrecognized.



The winner, Roy Keyes posted a blog titled “48 Cores to Beat Cancer” which shows how AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors can help to enhance radiation cancer treatments. Per Roy’s blog post,



“As part of my PhD research at the University of New Mexico, I am working on algorithms for calculating radiation dose distributions that will make use of dedicated, massive multi-core machines and clusters. … With 48 AMD cores, I plan to demonstrate that cancer clinics can finally produce the most accurate radiation therapy dose calculations, which will allow patients to receive more accurate and effective cancer treatments with fewer adverse effects.”



Please let me know if you’re interested in speaking with John Fruehe, AMD’s Director of Product Marketing for Server/Workstation products about the overwhelming interest in the contest, the diversity of the entrants and the surprising ways that people are using AMD products.