Will the Xbox One Cloud Underdeliver like The Cell Processor?

[ICStats]

Machiavellian said:

ICStats said:

Machiavellian said:

ICStats said:

nVidia has some very powerful servers with lots of Kepler boards and they are great for professional rendering for movie studios, who can afford to pay $20K+ for these things to improve productivity.

I don't think MS have GPUs in their cloud.  Xeon CPU's designed for cloud don't even have embedded graphics.  Even though one or two cores on a Xeon server may have quadruple the power of the Xbox One CPU, it's actually not enough to draw much graphics.  The XB1 can render far more graphics on it's own.

We shall see.  There are a few things that can be done, but not very impactful IMO, and take a lot of developer effort.  I mean, I'm a graphics developer.  If you asked me to come up with any ideas for using the cloud for graphics I could give you some, but if you asked me if I think it's a good idea I would say no way.

Devs will use the cloud for what is a good fit, not try to do something weird which would break the game if you had spotty connectivity or an offline user.

You do know that you do not have to have a GPU to render graphics.  Also a lot of new graphical features can be easily done using CPU compute.  Using thousands of CPUs in the cloud to perform those calculations is called cloud compute.  Also Intel Xeon chips actually do perform graphics calculations and from a little research their E3-1200v3 chip is built off theire Haswell design.  Even AMD offers graphics processing with their Server Opteron chips.  Its a misconception to believe that Nvidia has the only option or that their solution is the only one that can be leverage.

The thing is you are limiting your thinking to what is done today.  Thats actually being very narrow in your perception.  New techniques are being developed every moment and there probably will be plenty developed using cloud compute.  I see a lot of pontential in this space because I have seen throughout my years how fast cloud based tech has improved.  Now that companies like Intel, AMD, Nvidia and MS are leveraging their skills in this area mean we will start to see a lot of innovative ways cloud compute can expan this space.

You just don't realize how weak CPUs are at 3D rendering compared to GPUs today.  Think hundreds of times slower.  I could go into more detail but I don't think it's your area of expertise.

Plus I'm not talking abot the all time future potential, I'm just talking about the current solution.  If MS says they have 3X the CPU power of the XB1 in the cloud, then that is not thousands of CPUs in the cloud.

I believe you are not getting how a cloud based compute system would work.  I believe you are getting confused with how Playstation Now works compared to what MS is doing. 

Here is an example of what Intel has done with Wofenstien a few years ago.

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/24860-23754-revision

This is taking just the rendering engine for the wofenstien game and running it in the cloud.  This can be done with many different parts of a game where the developer could leverage such a setup and if you include the size and capability of Azure, MS should be able to deliver around the world.

The thing is, technology is moving at a pace most gamers have no clue about.  Companies are not goining into this space because the cloud cannot handle it.  Instead they are rushing into this space because it is a gold mine and the company with the big pockets probably will be the one to come out on top.  This is not future pontential, its todays solution because most companies that saw this coming was already investing in it like Intel and MS.  MS did not just wake on the release of the X1 and thought about a cloud based compute infrastructure.  They have been working on this since 2005.

You seem to not have any idea of the economies involved here.  Plus I'm not arguing that it's impossible to render in the cloud.  A lot is possible with enough resources.  You could put some SLI Titan boards on the servers and stream games with the highest PC fidelity today.  It would just be expensive.

If you listen carefully you would hear that demo from Intel was running on 4 larrabee equipped servers.  Intel now sells Xeon Phi cards like that.  They cost thousands, and draw 300 Watts of power each.  Very expensive to build and operate.  Microsoft could do that, but maybe Xbox Live Gold would need to be $50 a month instead of $5 a month.

With nVida Grid, last year at nVidia's GPU conference you could play PS3 quality Street Fighter 4 in a Grid powered cloud.  Nice tech, but the costs... you would likely need to charge users $1 an hour.  Would you pay that?

Just because it can be built, doesn't mean it can be done economically and be a "goldmine".  Cloud compute isn't free - it has a set up cost and a running cost (space, electricity, bandwidth).  People pay to use it.  Given how much money Microsoft makes from their users on games and Xbox Live subscriptions, there are limits to how much cloud compute could be dedicated to each user, and so there are limits to what could be achieved in such a service.  I believe the compute available will be so limited, that you won't be able to be used to enhance XB1 graphics in a meaningful way.

Also your example is JUST like Playstation Now - it's a game fully rendered in the cloud and streamed to the client as a video.  He mentions the client is a "thin client", ie. it's just something to display the video.  Same as Sony will stream PS Now to Vita TV, smart devices, etc. because all they need to do is display a video.  You don't need a $500 Xbox One to stream the video.