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Company Success Stories - The Jerde Partnership International
The Jerde Partnership International Uses AMD Athlon Processor-Based Systems To Help Design A New World
Profile
The Jerde Partnership International
http://www.jerde.com
July 1, 2002
"Increased processing capacity empowers architects to do more high quality projects in less time"
The Jerde Partnership International is not your run-of-the-mill architectural and urban design firm. The creative drive behind Jerde projects is nothing less than the desire to influence the cultural goals and aspirations of urban societies.
Jerde created the architecture and design for the Olympic Games in 1984, designed the revitalization of Fremont Street in Las Vegas, as well as the largest privately-developed real estate project in Japan, a mixed use facility in Fukuoka, Japan. Throughout the world, in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, billion dollar plus Jerde projects have been designed to serve as catalysts for urban transformation. The central idea is to create gathering places for a population that has been fractured by previous urban landscapes, producing a greater sense of unity.
"The need for community is universal," said Thomas Jaggers, Jerde Vice President and Chief Technical Officer. "As countries continue to modernize, uprooted communities search for connection in both urban and suburban conditions. Our efforts have been focused on a unique and heretofore unrecognized target. We are architects, but we address issues beyond the building. Our work attempts to synthesize many disciplines in order to produce the tools needed to advance human community as we move into time."
Time is a critical dimension in Jerde projects because each project requires investigations and representations of the past and projections of how designs may affect the future. "We use technology for time travel," said Jaggers. "We unravel the past to learn its lessons, just as we project our ideas and designs forward into the future. Whether we are collaborating within our office, communicating across the globe, making presentations to corporations or exploring designs experientially, we use AMD Athlon processor-based technology to extend and magnify our talents and pursuits."
Jerde architects constantly engage in computationally intensive tasks such as CAD drawings and rendering, and compute-intense multi-processor animation projects. However, even for a mobile company in a mobile era, the firm's primary tool remains the workstation.
Over the past several years, Jerde has become an AMD Athlon business. "We use AMD in 90% of our systems," said Jaggers. "We use AMD Athlon™ processors because we rely on powerful floating point calculations required by our math-intensive CAD programs."
The powerful performance of the AMD-based systems has led to significant increases in productivity. "As we have fully outfitted our firm with digital tools and as our staff has become digitally literate we have been able to shrink our design teams for comparable projects at a ratio of at least 5:1," said Jaggers. "Today's technology allows us to design two to five million square-foot projects with five to six people instead of thirty. Fewer employees per project allows the team to communicate and respond exponentially faster to design elements, directions and economic conditions. Less people per design team require less management, a reduced labor expense and a more efficient process."
The implicit promise of new technology is that it will create opportunities for individuals to engage in higher levels of creative productivity. At Jerde, improved technology has created a noticeable sense of empowerment among users as well as new markets and profit centers for the company.
"The power we can get from a single computer is amazing," said Jaggers. "Simply put, our employees have been empowered. They are designing more architecture and are more connected to the architectural design process and that allows them to gain more experience."
Jerde’s goal is to evolve architectural ideas and the impact those ideas have on peoples' lives; they have been able to increase the capability and capacity of their work by using AMD processor-based systems.
"Our AMD Athlon™ processor-based systems allow us to more effectively accomplish the overwhelming task of designing communities," said Jaggers. "We need as much computational power as possible while at the same time distributing it to as many employees as possible. Extra processing power allows our teams to further explore and fine-tune their projects. The final design results in a much better development, community and, maybe, culture."
© 2002 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved.
AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD Athlon, and combinations thereof, are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Other product names used are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective companies.
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