Xbox One Xbox One Is Literally Built For Cloud Computing

FordGTGuy

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Various less efficient but non-destructive compression techniques can be used such as zip and Lempel-Ziv (LZ), and it's of note that Microsoft has included four dedicated 'Memory Move Engines' on its main processor, two of which have LZ abilities. One has LZ decode and the other LZ encode, meaning Microsoft has such interest in compressing data that it has dedicated silicon to the job instead of leaving it to the CPU. The raw specs of 200MB/s data decoding is certainly enough to handle any amount of data traffic coming from the internet at broadband speeds, but the inclusion of these engines sadly doesn't point conclusively to an intention in streaming compressed assets from the cloud.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-in-theory-can-xbox-one-cloud-transform-gaming
 
Yup, this is what I have been saying lol the PS4 is going to be like a house that was retro fitted to be self sustaining and a Xbox one is going to be like a house that was planned out before hand and built from the ground up to be self sustaining, it's just going to be better in the long run performance wise because an all digital future is where we are headed.
 
The creativity this is going to give devs is what I'm excited about the most. It's going to allow games to take a leap forward, not just graphically speaking like it's always been with new consoles.
 
with the DME's able to directly access the display pane...this opens up a lot of possibilities. pre-computed renders could be fed directly out.

also, with the 4 DME's, there looks to be 2 "pack" and 2 "unpack"...so compression is going to be ridiculous, as well as de-compression of data. depending on what compressing techniques they use, this could turn mb's of data into mere kb's.

This could be really big in the coming years, as first party devs start to really push the envelope of what's possible in a cloud-compute scenario working together with local hardware. physics, AI, draw-distance, texturing (to a point) could possibly be handled outside of the local system and free up that space to enhance the performance of the hardware itself.

latency IS an issue, but if the compression is good enough...it could be brought down in a lot of cases to 100ms...which would work out to...about 3 frames in a 30fps game or 6 frames for a 60fps game. Look at it this way...a human muscle reacts in 200 milliseconds.

Now, this tech wouldn't improve IQ/frame rate/display resolution...but it would make the game a hell of a lot prettier i'd imagine. better textures/AI/lighting...freeing up GPU cycles and CPU cycles to optimize other aspects of the game.

Good move Microsoft...future-proofing your console intelligently.

Now, those worried about broadband connection...congress is trying to pass legislature that would bring 1GB/s connections to most homes by around 2015. average broadband speeds have also increased at a level of ~25% YOY...broadband/high-speed internet is penetrating even the most local communities now, as the cost of investment in the system is not only subsidized by most governments, but the cost itself has bottomed out as the tech has gotten much better and the materials have reached a mainstream level of production.

This is one hell of a gamble...but it's one that theoretically will pay off within the first few years of the console's existence. Expect mostly first-party developers to really push the envelope with this tech, with 3rd parties following suit as the implementation becomes available. There needs to be some decent coding breakthroughs before what I envision as the future of cloud computing comes to pass. Devs in first party will have the advantage here, and Microsoft is willing to make these investments. It's a good day to be a gamer :)
 
This demo impressed me!

demo that shows 30,000 or so asteroids, all of whose positions and movement are culled from real NASA data. The asteroid show up on a big screen in the Xbox 101 demo room. They're all purple.

"Doing all of this computation would require a little over 10 consoles from the last generation," he says. "This is like taking about 10 1/2 Xbox 360s worth of CPU power and cramming it into one elegantly-designed Xbox One. So we are thrilled at what we have been able to do there. Because this type of raw processor horsepower that's mapping the current time and position in space in real time can all be done by a single Xbox One."

He then flips a switch or presses a button or something and about 300,000 more asteroids appear. These are green and all calculated, he says, by the cloud. "What we've done is we've actually invoked CPU resources from the cloud that can instantly be brought online and scaled up and those cloud CPU processes are now feeding about 500,000 updates per second to help us track every single asteroid in real time."

I later ask him if this demo is for real. We're seeing it in the middle of the E3 show, after all, where Internet connections are notoriously dreadful. Yes, it's real, he says, "We are on an Ethernet line with a private line out connected to our data centers." If the plug was pulled, the cloud asteroids would disappear.

Asteroids are nice, but Henshaw anticipated that his Xbox 101 audience would wonder what the point was, especially for games.

"So things like local foliage, blades of grass, atmospheric effects, gunfire, those things can be offloaded to the cloud," he says, "because they're all going to be in your immediate periphery and you want them to be hyper-realistic but not something you necessarily want to burden the console with.
 
I hope this is going to do what they say it is rather than being a hassle. If it does live up to the hype, then I'm far more accepting of the always-online thing. I guess we'll have to wait and see if it makes much of a difference, but I'm generally optimistic about it. Worst case scenario, I suppose they have to rely on the Xbox One's internal hardware alone.
 
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