Monday, June 22nd 2020
Microsoft Project xCloud Servers to be Powered by Xbox Series X SoC
Microsoft is preparing to launch a competitive product to Google's Stadia and Amazon's Project Tempo, which are both game streaming services. To Microsoft's advantage, the company has experience in building gaming systems and using cloud technology to integrate them. While both Google and Amazon are cloud providers and have the infrastructure to implement game streaming services, Microsoft has its Xbox division, which has been in the gaming industry for a long time. Despite already owning the infrastructure, Microsoft wants to use the hardware from its Xbox consoles as a base of the upcoming game streaming service called Project xCloud.
According to sources of Tom Warren, senior editor at Verge, Microsoft will be re-using the Xbox SoCs found in their consoles. According to the source, in the beginning, Microsoft is going to use Xbox One S blades to power its game streaming service. After that, the company will upgrade its servers with more powerful Xbox Series X SoC. As a reminder, the Xbox Series X SoC has 8 Ryzen CPU cores based on "Zen 2" µarch, RDNA 2 GPU capable of delivering 12 TFLOPs, 16 GB of GDDR6 memory and a mighty fast SSD. This will be enough to satisfy game streaming service demands and power all of the AAA titles users will be playing once it is available.
Source:
Tom Warren (Twitter)
According to sources of Tom Warren, senior editor at Verge, Microsoft will be re-using the Xbox SoCs found in their consoles. According to the source, in the beginning, Microsoft is going to use Xbox One S blades to power its game streaming service. After that, the company will upgrade its servers with more powerful Xbox Series X SoC. As a reminder, the Xbox Series X SoC has 8 Ryzen CPU cores based on "Zen 2" µarch, RDNA 2 GPU capable of delivering 12 TFLOPs, 16 GB of GDDR6 memory and a mighty fast SSD. This will be enough to satisfy game streaming service demands and power all of the AAA titles users will be playing once it is available.
6 Comments on Microsoft Project xCloud Servers to be Powered by Xbox Series X SoC
Then you have GaaS + WaaS - Games as a Service (Forza, Gears of War Ultimate, Gears of War 4, none of these are available on Win32 platform, they want to shove their crappy UWP DRM sadly), Windows updating itself without any user approval and tons of bugs all the time with every Windows SAC update, removing the powerful CP to modernize the OS and dumb down new users. Now XCloud drama another GaaS BS, add that Microsoft Flight Sim which uses Azure AI to stream textures so that you can never play it offline. Shame that how gaming is now becoming, way to go M$. I have zero faith in this corporation in making any worthwhile games anymore, they are just like EA and rest. It'd be a miracle if that Halo Infinite pulls it off.
All this hyper fast SSD, Zen 2 moon architectcure is usless if the core principle is mainstream pandering. After all it was expected by this year their soyboxes are running out of technology, thus new HW.
is all I will say.
Also, of course they are not immediately throwing out 2-3 year old servers with the new one. This isn't a supercomputer cluster, where all nodes have to be tightly connected. This is more akin to a web server farm (or more accurately, a remote rendering farm) - there is some data interconnect, but individual nodes could be anywhere from new to 5+ years old.