Xbox One has power of 10 Xbox 360 consoles, says Microsoft
And the company says the power becomes "infinite" with cloud technology, which game developers have been "incredibly positive" about
Microsoft may still be reeling from the PR nightmare about Xbox One's used game policies and always online nature, but that hasn't stopped the company from espousing the next-gen platform's big potential. In a closed-door meeting called "Xbox 101" attended by GamesIndustry International, the company stressed that Xbox One has "the computational power of more than 10 Xbox 360 consoles," and that "the cloud brings infinite additional processing power."
Those are the words of Xbox One engineering manager Jeff Henshaw, who led a demonstration about how Xbox One's power has enabled Microsoft to create a demo using real data from NASA to track the orbital velocity of 40,000 asteroids in space. While Henshaw and his team are very proud of the power of Xbox One when it's offline, the real advantage, he stressed, comes from Microsoft's special cloud services.
"Microsoft has hundreds of thousands of servers and dozens of data centers geographically distributed all around the planet, and Xbox One has the ability to instantly tap in to that limitless computational horsepower," Henshaw explained. With that extra cloud power, Microsoft is able "to take the number of asteroids from 40,000 to 330,000, and any device doing the computational math to realistically in real-time chart the orbital velocity of 330,000 asteroids would melt a hole in the ground, but Xbox One is able to do it without even breaking a sweat because it's pulling in virtualized cloud computing resources."
"Game developers have given us incredibly positive feedback on the crazy different ways that they can use this incredible new cloud power resource"
Jeff Henshaw
Henshaw added that even with all the power being used, Xbox One remains incredibly silent (no doubt an important aspect to note given how loud Xbox 360 hardware has been). "We have about 500,000 updates per second coming from our global computing cloud down to this Xbox One so it can all be managed completely seamlessly. The beautiful thing that's happening here is we are seamlessly blending Xbox One's incredible processing power with the limitless processing power of the cloud," he continued.
So why is Microsoft going out of its way to show us a screen full of thousands of asteroids? Well, the implication is that if Xbox One can track all these asteroids, then it can certainly create massive, highly detailed game worlds for gamers to enjoy.
"Game developers are building games that have bigger levels than ever before. In fact, game developers can now create persistent worlds that encompass tens or hundreds of thousands of players without taxing any individual console, and those worlds that they built can be lusher and more vibrant than ever before because the cloud persists and is always there, always computing," Henshaw said.
"Those worlds can live on in between game sessions. If one player drops out, that world will continue on and can experience the effects of time, like wear from weather damage, so that when a player comes back into the universe it's actually a slightly evolved place in the same way that our real world evolves a little bit from the time we go to sleep to the time we wake up. Game developers have given us incredibly positive feedback on the crazy different ways that they can use this incredible new cloud power resource."
It all seems a bit theoretical, but if the cloud can be as valuable a resource for developers as Microsoft says, perhaps consumers won't mind the Xbox One being always online when they play.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqyixwqiCag
Edited 3 times. Last edit by kevin williams on 14th June 2013 4:03am
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHXfMjp2zqI
Seen how they literally pay people to use their stuff and all, I wouldn't be too surprised if GI gets money from them for the articles they've made lately. C'mon GI, tell us the truth :D
Bond: "I suppose you expect me to talk?"
Goldfinger: "No, Mr Bond - I expect you to DIIIIIIIIIE."
The 360 was launched for holiday season 2005, the One for holiday season 2013. So 8 years development. Or 4 times 2 years.
First doubling = 2. Second doubling = 4. Third doubling = 8. Fourth doubling = 16.
So an Xbox one should have the power of 16 Xbox 360s. If it only has the power of 10 Xbox 360s then they have gone backwards!
http://www.destructoid.com/pax-state-of-decay-is-not-just-another-zombie-game-234265.phtml
Edit:
Also, isn't the Cloud just a dedicated server backbone? It might be dealing with more things, but it's surely just the same as a MMORPG or DayZ server?
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Morville O'Driscoll on 14th June 2013 10:36am
You can't hang on Moore's law to say what a manufacturer should pout in their hardware. Moore's law also doesn't just apply to console cycles either, there are chips that are a lot more powerful than your calculation, they're just not in consoles... Since 2005 the order of magnitude in which processing power has increased is staggering.
Xbox One and PS4 are powerful consoles but the leap in terms of multiplication over the previous generation isn't necessarily as high as before, mainly to save money and to have better control over other factors such as minimal power consumption, small form (PS4 anyway) and low heat.
The fact its 10x as powerful is somewhat incidental. Could have been more than a factor of 16 could have been a factor of 4 or 5 depending on how much MS wanted to spend or what manufacturing processes were available from the given semiconductor company (AMD).
Moore's law is alive and well. Just look at ARM.
But seriously, lets consider raw computing power.
GOVT centres and corporations with gabillion central processing servers
disseminated by everyones home console and PC
= Planet Earth brain
its enough to do weird stuff like time jumps and manipulate weather maybe.
Maybe there is a super elitist plan.
Edited 2 times. Last edit by John Pickford on 14th June 2013 12:55pm
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=581656
So much hate for the Xbox One.....brings a tear to my eye.
What it means in the end is that this new gen on console will remain relevant even longer than the previous one, probably for about 10 years, before there is a real reason to change. The cloud will not compensate for local architectural difs and I tend to think the PS4 will quickly prove much more powerful than the X1. They will run the same games, but faster and nicer on Sony side, with exclusive really showing the gap. MS certainly knows it, so they kind of try to damage control with that vague cloud claim. Note that it's hardly a distinctive advantage anyway, as Sony could very well fire up a couple of servers to do matchmaking on them and call it cloud. Still curious to seen what they will do in the end with the Gakai tech the bought... 2014 they said, will be interesting to see.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Todd Weidner on 14th June 2013 4:33pm
Cool.
Xbone needs to showcase at GDC or TGS the actually differences with and without cloud computing. Otherwise it's just jargon and nonsense to the average consumer. If they can offload enemy AI to the cloud that would unload a lot of CPU processing power. Or even offload physics to the cloud would mean a world of extra local CPU power to allocate to things that needs to be realtime calculations.
But without real proof they are just talking out of their PR A$$. MS needs to hire new PR.
Its not game set and match yet.
Galaxy tab is popular but not as popular as some devices. I'm not saying ARM should be complacent but they are clearly dominant. All the major providers use ARM and even Samsung's own Exynos is based on ARM. Qualcomm use it, Nvidia use it and so on.
This is a FIRST for Intel but they still face a company that has over 90% of the market and chips that still need to become more competitive on power consumption.
To say ARM are suddenly being eclipsed by Intel is not true at this stage. Intel are completely reworking their strategy around fighting ARM in the future and would,d have gone to great lengths to get a new product on board.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Adam Campbell on 14th June 2013 11:46pm
But I guess playing old games on new tech is soo un-cool these days. Even Apple, the most notorious company for the lack of backwards compatibility, is getting it right these days. Windows RT, Xbox Music (not compatible with Zune), and now this, looks like MS forgot what made Windows great and them rich in the first place (most likely because there was no cloud looming out the windows back then lol)
Processing in the cloud....the Blast Processing of the 2010's.
If so, well that's a pay solution for Sony fans that should require much use of the PS4's processors right (or dead wrong?). If so, I think Sony might be hiding an ace up its sleeve that they'll toss out next year that will basically please current PS3 owners (although I don't have a clue what it would cost per year in addition to PS Plus)...
I stay up too late and think of crazy shit sometimes...
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Greg Wilcox on 15th June 2013 7:32am
Still, its not about computing power.
People have already made attempts at software emulation yet any product that claims to do it is fake. The type of architecture in the previous gen is too complex to just say "oh emulate it".
PS3 was some 33x as powerful as its predecessor yet couldn't properly emulate it without PS2 chips inside. We're looking at not just a different approach to language but other low level features that do not match up.
Seeing as the CPU is the big problem, the console probably doesn't carry enough performance or flexibility in that area to make it possible. Most of the power is from the GPU side though emulating the 360 GPU wouldn't be the problem. I feel people are unaware of just what they're asking when architectures so sophisticated are involved.
That the tiny Sims individual lives couldn't possibly be computated locally so required cloud processing to simulate all of their lives. It turned out to be false however after a patch allowing Sim City to run locally showed the Sims acting identically.
I smell the two companies are borrowing each others marketing techniques to defend always on. It certainly *sounds* very convincing if true and practical.
Edited 2 times. Last edit by Petter Solberg on 16th June 2013 9:18pm
or something like that - it's a few minutes in and it doesn't sound like a slip-up...