by Lidia Paulinska | Jul 2, 2018
In the next 10 years eSports will be the most popular sport in the world – predicts Frank Azor, co-founder of Alienware and vice president & general manager of Gaming & XPS for Dell who made the prediction statement during an exclusive interview at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo), the biggest annual gaming conference in North America that took place in the middle of June in Los Angeles. The E3 expo featured 70 thousand attendees from 106 countries. E3 is the preeminent showcase for ground-breaking new games and technology that serves the growing community of gamers.
In March of this year Alienware opened its first professional eSportsTraining Facility in North America, located in Los Angeles. Just minutes from Riot Games LCS Studio, this new location helps Team Liquid, a professional gamer franchise team, improve the way they practice, train and prepare for eSports tournament. Alienware is the largest supplier of the gaming computer systems in the world, as a sponsor of the team, they provide the eSports athletes with access to incredible technology that is currently available. Alienware is also talking to new partners to build relationships that allows eSports to grow on unprecedented scale.
There are no other sports out there, with the exception of motorsports racing, where the athlete’s performance has a dependency on their equipment is as great as it is as esports athletics – elaborates Frank Azor. If you look at traditional sport like football or basketball, the equipment that the athletes use maybe helps in tiny fraction of the amount of their competitiveness. eSports however is more closely related to auto racing, the skill is in using the equipment to compete, so when your PC fails on you, you are out of the game.
The global industry has not completed the statistics, but the rumors are that number of people in the audience watching eSports tournaments has already passed the audience of baseball games.
Here is a full coverage of the interview with Frank Azor:
by Lidia Paulinska | Sep 6, 2016
Siggraph, July 2016 – The annual SIGGRAPH event is the meeting place for the academics, innovators, industry and professional media producers to meet and share their experiences. The commonality is the blending of the technology and engineering with the artistic vision that drive cinema, TV and advertising. To help realize these visions on a release schedule, the computers used had to change and became workstations.
Dell’s Precision Workstations had a lot of visibility at the SIGGRAPH 2016 show even though Dell did not have a booth on the show floor and the company did not introduce any new products. We living on providing solutions – said Molly Connolly, WW Industry Strategist, Media & Entertainment – We are looking for symbiotic microcosms. She confirmed that the company understands the balance with software professional community and also their customers. Her focus is on how we can engage with the community and listen what their needs are to make their workstations even better.
Dell’s workstation is a solution for the SIGGRAPH community.
The facts are that you don’t need the workstation if you are just running office and email but everyone who is creating visual and digital content, and those who are using the professional applications for creating the digital content; those professionals need system commonality, multi-processors with multiple cores, ECC memory, professional graphics compute capability, fast storage, fast IO & networking. All that workstation provides.
Workstation are for time critical applications and they are designed not to fail and require the user re-crate the content. If you running a 3 day rendering task, and you know that your film has to be in theaters in 8 weeks, the workstation is the solution for you. The same for broadcasting space. Broadcast cannot let the screen go dark or have the content interrupted.
Dell’s workstations for M&E Tech space enables the magic to happen – said Molly. Dell’s workstation has been used by the last five winner of Academy Awards for Visual Effects. Molly went on to state that – “We’ve been very fortunate. Dell precision workstation has been recognized as leader in performance.” This recognition has been for both the desktop and portable workstations.
This capability is what is driving Dell as one of the dominant platforms for the creation of VR content. The workstations are designed to support all the pieces needed for this new stereoscopic and 360 degree content marketplace, and are being quickly adopted as the computer of choice for the VR creators.
Looking at the process. Artists create the content – mostly at the workstation, they manage the content – typically on server, then they deliver the content and you enjoy it (or consume it). The workstations, with their fault tolerant design, construction for long hours of continuous operation and capacity for high performance computing allow this process to happen on a predictable schedule, freeing the artists to create their vision, rather than worry about the computing.
