http://www.polygon.com/2013/6/13/4427394/xbox-one-developers-team-up-nasa

"So we went to NASA, because NASA has this really cool database. It has every single celestial body in the inner solar system, including planets, moons, asteroids, comets." says Henshaw. The result is a tech demo simulation of space based on out to 35 thousand light years of data which tracks the position, velocity and orbital trajectory of every single subset of asteroids between Mars and Pluto. Each of the 40,000 asteroids are calculated and rendered, presenting its time and place to a high degree of accuracy."

It's an example of the possibilities of the system, which according to Henshaw includes the ability to feature "10,000 or 100,000 enemies in-game" while maintaining a high level of realism and fluidity in the near-field view by offloading it to the cloud. Comparatively, to get the same result from last-generation consoles it would require "10 and a half Xbox 360 consoles all working in parallel" in terms of computational horsepower, he adds.

"This is how the cloud will change the gaming experience," he says. "If a developer wants to do really crazy stuff we can see how he can map and compute 330,000 asteroids in real-time via global cloud computing. There are 500,000 updates per second from the cloud to Xbox One. Developers tell us this is a miracle for them. Even the highest of highest PCs could not do all of this at once, it really takes global cloud computing resources."

Xbox One makes roughly 100,000 servers available and dozens of data centres for developers to use — a number that Henshaw says is likely to grow over time.

I really want to see cloud computing improving games graphically, it is the solution to the problem of the lack of upgrade on consoles.

Cloud still fiction? 100,000 servers dedicated to cloud processing? At launch?

and that's why Microsoft limt the countries on release. Microsoft are playing the long game.

So the rocket science claim wasn't far fetched. That's surreal!

this just remind me more and more of 2006.. Cluster of PS3 used to build a supercomputer, used for cracking password and protein folding and what not.

I remember when games were simple.

I wonder if people know that Azure is what Pixar uses as their render farm for their movies.  Yes, Pixar RenderMan is in the cloud and anybody can use it.  Here is a link that talk about the setup

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2010/10/28/pdc-why-steve-jobs-pixar-uses-microsoft-windows-azure/

People have used Azure for raytrace work and Azure is very capable of doing such things for games as well.  The problem is bandwidth which is always the issue.  MS could easily do what Gaikai does and re-render scenes using raytrace techniques and stream that video content to the user just like Giakai.  This is probably one of the differences between cloud computing and what Giakai does.  Gaikai can only stteam a game the way the game was created while MS cloud compute can actually plug into the games graphics pipline and use different rendering techniques to give a far better graphical output.

For people who are doubting this, a few google searches should ease your mind.

The difference is that MS actually have the cluster, they have the technology now and they have the platform.  Sony never had anything setup and it was just a pie in the sky of what can be done.  MS infrastructure is here today ready to be used and they have the software platform Orleanes ready to do the work.

Render farm... it is a low latency task... you can wait the results get to the client... real-time processing graphcis in games not.

I love posts like this... Factual and interesting information passed in a coherent manner. Thumbs up.