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Sensei said:
1.5mps "basic broadband" wouldn't be enough to cloud compute even PS3 games. I recommend you an interesting read DigitalFoundry has about MS Cloud (they are the same guys who nailed every Xbone and PS4 leaked specs): http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-in-theory-can-xbox-one-cloud-transform-gaming Just a quote from the article: "Average broadband speeds in the developed world struggle to reach over 8mbps as of Q3 last year - that's only one megabyte per second. This means that whatever cloud computing power is available, consoles will have available to them an average of 1MB/s a second of processed data. If we compare that to the sort of bandwidth consoles are used to, the DDR3 of Xbox One is rated at around 68,000MB/s, and even that wasn't enough for the console and had to be augmented with the ESRAM. The PS4 memory system allocates around 20,000MB/s for the CPU of its total 176,000MB/s. The cloud can provide one twenty-thousandth of the data to the CPU that the PS4's system memory can. You may have an internet connection that's much better than 8mbps of course, but even superfast fibre-optic broadband at 50mbps equates to an anaemic 6MB/s. This represents a significant bottleneck to what can be processed on the cloud, and that's before upload speed is even considered. Upload speed is a small fraction of download speed, and this will greatly reduce how much information a job can send to the cloud to process. " And this is how they end the article: "Microsoft needs to prove its position with strong ideas and practical demonstrations. Until then, it's perhaps best not to get too carried away with the idea of a super-powered console, and there's very little evidence that Sony needs to be worried about its PS4 specs advantage being comprehensively wiped out by "the power of the cloud"." |
1.5mps "basic broadband" wouldn't be enough to cloud compute even PS3 games. I recommend you an interesting read DigitalFoundry has about MS Cloud (they are the same guys who nailed every Xbone and PS4 leaked specs):
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-in-theory-can-xbox-one-cloud-transform-gaming
Just a quote from the article:
The problem with using the Eurogamer article is that they do not know what MS requirements for cloud compute. The do not know what type of data needs to be sent and what data is returned. Without having this information the Eurogamer author can only conjecture based on his experience which from reading the article is nill. First we would have to know what is sent by the client machine. Is the data compressed and if so how much. Also we would need to know what type of data is being sent. Rendering, AI, Physics, vertices, you name it.
If MS has a copy of your game in the cloud, then basically only parameters would need to be sent. MS cloud compute take in those parameters execute them using the cloud and send back the data. This data can be highly compressed and process by the X1 APU because its designed to process compressed data (info from leaked document). This is the advantage of MS cloud compute because it can run your code native to the cloud this alleviating the need to send a lot of data. Do not forget that MS also have dedicated hardware for encoding meaning all of this can be done without having to use any of the APU processors to accomplish this task. All of this can be done in parallel and thus allowing the APU to acquire this info as if it was cached by the native system.
There is a hundred different ways to skin this cat and get around the bandwidth and latency issue that the Eurogamer article does not cover because the person writing it is not a programmer. Also the author of the Eurogamer article did not even ask developers what their opinion and if any are doing such work to get a more real world take on the issue.
The PS4 memory system allocates around 20,000MB/s for the CPU of its total 176,000MB/s. The cloud can provide one twenty-thousandth of the data to the CPU that the PS4's system memory can. You may have an internet connection that's much better than 8mbps of course, but even superfast fibre-optic broadband at 50mbps equates to an anaemic 6MB/s. This represents a significant bottleneck to what can be processed on the cloud, and that's before upload speed is even considered. Upload speed is a small fraction of download speed, and this will greatly reduce how much information a job can send to the cloud to process. "
The problem with this line of thought is that it presumes that cloud compute is pushing data into the CPU/GPU. Instead cloud compute does all of the calculations ahead of when the CPU needs it and presents the data as a cache for the CPU/GPU to fetch when needed. Its the whole purpose of cloud compute in the first place. The data is there so the CPU and GPU does not have to calculate it and is fetched when needed. MS already stated this even in the article but it appears the author did not understand the concept.
"Microsoft needs to prove its position with strong ideas and practical demonstrations. Until then, it's perhaps best not to get too carried away with the idea of a super-powered console, and there's very little evidence that Sony needs to be worried about its PS4 specs advantage being comprehensively wiped out by "the power of the cloud"."
So basically the author states something we all came to the conclusion without him clouding the situation without throughly investigating the technology. I totally agree with this point but then again its new tech an MS made a statement which means it will be something they will actively push. So yes, they will have to prove their words. The difference is that they do have the infrastructure, Platform in Orleans and it appears a few games that will show if they are talking nonsence. Either way, the Eurogamer article I would not used as a reference because its very shallow. Hell, the author did not even know what questions to ask MS when the chance was there. Things like
What platform will you use for Cloud comute. How dows this platform process information. What type of info is sent from the client machien. What is returned from the server. How does the server leverage the cloud. How is data processed, replicated etc. There are so many questions that was not asked which could have solved a lot of confusion.
