ICStats said:
You seem to not have any idea of the economies involved here. Plus I'm not arguing that it's impossible, I'm arguing that it's not what MS have suggested. 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. Far too expensive to build and operate. Just because it can be built, doesn't mean it can be done economically and be a "goldmine". Cloud compute is very elastic, but it isn't free. Xbox Live Gold would have to be 10 times more expensive to pay for that. 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 console to play Gaikai or OnLive on it. |
@Bolded: Do you understand that since 2009, MS has spent more than 4 billion on their datacenter. At this point in time MS has more than a million servers around the world making them second to Google. Just in the last 2 years MS has spent more than 2.5 billion on building their cloud infrastructure. It seems pretty obvious to me that MS is spending the money in this space. As for them using Intel knights Landing, Corner or even their Xeon Phi, who knows. Also who knows how their investment will be funded but then again there are many ways to go about that. Breaking even on revenue compared to server cost could also be their option depending on what their goal is to get developers using their servers. I will not waste to much space speculating as there are many creative ways to tier up a system like this.
I know exactly what the demo was running, I read that article a while ago and I have also kept up with Nvidia and AMD solutions as well. What I am telling you is that MS has put the money in the infrastructure and they also have built the platform which is Orleans which they also have spent over 3 years building to support their cloud compute platform.
As for the demo being the same as Playstation Now, yes and no. Yes the entire game is running server side but how its run is totally different how Playstation now operates. Playstation now run the whole game in the cloud, compresses the output and send it to a supporting device. In other words, its one instance of the game running on one PS3 type server. The Intell demo has 2 different parts of the game running in the cloud. There is the one server instance of the game that send data to the second instance that is the rendering engine. In other words, the rendering engine for the graphics is running totally separate from the main engine. This would be the case if this was running the main instance of the game on the X1 while the rendering engine is running server side. You could even have one host instance in the cloud that syncs up with the client instance of one to many X1 systems. This way a lot of data does not have to be uploaded just the position of the user at and what they are doing. The host instance can then just send the revelant pieces of code to process over the cloud for multiple servers to process the scene. The rendering engine in the intel demo is actually using cloud compute as it takes the scene and split it up into 32X32 or 64X64 pixels and distribute the work amoung each of their servers. Each machine will finish the one frame and send back the data to the client machine.
This is just a graphics demostration but the same could be done with other parts of a game like AI, lighting, environmental effects. Also the cloud is greate for other rendering techniques like point rendering, voxel rendering.
