Machiavellian said:
I am not to sure on this. As mentioned the two technologies are totaly different. If what I post is pretty much common knowledge please bear with me. Gaikai host a game instance on a server, then streams the video to a client. For each person who wants to play a certain game, an instance of that game is created. Think of this like having multiple virtual machines. For example sake, lets say 5 virtual or even hardware machines each one running a version of windows and either sharing or have its own vid card. So when a users request a game, the virtual/hardware machine spins up an instance of that game. Software behinds the scenes take the outputted video, compresses it and streams it to a client. There is software on the client end that docompresses the video, and display the results while capturing input data and sends it back to the server. The software does not perform any computations of game code nor does it distribute it resources among multiple different servers. From the way that MS new Orleans platform works, developers can host an instance of their code on the cloud. This takes care of bandwidth and latency issues when sending from the client machine. On the cloud server, the code is executed and can be replicated to multuple instances. The code could then split out processes to be worked on like a Cell processor and then the results combined and sent back to the client machine. People have stated that why would MS go down this route when you have games able to do the calculations upfront. As I was doing a little digging on my break. I stumble on this intel project to do ray tracing using cloud compute. The article presents some interesting ideals on the type of rendering techniques that could be performed on the cloud that you would not see within your current or even next gen console. Here is the link http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/experimental-cloud-based-ray-tracing-using-intel-mic-architecture-for-highly-parallel |
Ok, this will take a while... damn you, quoting system!
"Gaikai host a game instance on a server, then streams the video to a client. For each person who wants to play a certain game, an instance of that game is created. Think of this like having multiple virtual machines. For example sake, lets say 5 virtual or even hardware machines each one running a version of windows and either sharing or have its own vid card. So when a users request a game, the virtual/hardware machine spins up an instance of that game. Software behinds the scenes take the outputted video, compresses it and streams it to a client. There is software on the client end that docompresses the video, and display the results while capturing input data and sends it back to the server. The software does not perform any computations of game code nor does it distribute it resources among multiple different servers."
Ok, Sony said you would be able to play ps3-games. To me there is no virtualizing. They would need an emulation of the ps3 in some way to make this scalable which I don't see. They will, in my opinion, need exactly one ps3 for every user who wants to play a ps3-game. There is no "sharing" as the hardware is too specific, Cell and GPU. But yes, there is no "game-code" running on the client-side.
"Cloud Compute execute code or jobs like your CPU/GPU would natively on your console. Think of how the Cell processor works. Developers create multiple jobs which are just snippets of code that they send to the different cell processors to work in parallel. The Cell processor works on each code independent of the other processors and sends back it's results. From here the main processor takes the finished code and deliver the results depending on what was calculated like, AI, physics, lighting you name it. With cloud compute, MS is able to leverage thousands of servers each having a number or processors and each processor able to execute multiple threads. The way that MS cloud platform works is that all of these resources are virtual. They are not tied to any particular hardware for fault tolerance. "
First, no, the cell doesn't compute independently, because they have common ressources the spus have to share. But anyway this is not what you can "off-load" because bandwidth and latency are magnitudes better than whatever internet you will have. What you are trying to say is not possible because the computing units need data fast - in time and amount. If it would be that easy they could also build a system with a pentium2 and offload everything to the cloud. Local hardware wouldn't be necessary at all (even with dedicated hardware). Also 300k servers would be way too less for the amount of users they are expecting.
"
People have stated that why would MS go down this route when you have games able to do the calculations upfront. As I was doing a little digging on my break. I stumble on this intel project to do ray tracing using cloud compute. The article presents some interesting ideals on the type of rendering techniques that could be performed on the cloud that you would not see within your current or even next gen console. Here is the link
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/experimental-cloud-based-ray-tracing-using-intel-mic-architecture-for-highly-parallel"
As I understand it they are talking about the benefits of calculating of calculating in the cloud and offering a stream of this to the user: Gaikai/Onlive.
This is different to what MS wants us to believe.
