Microsoft Project xCloud Servers to be Powered by Xbox Series X SoC

[AleksandarK]

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.


View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[kayjay010101]

They've mentioned they're rolling out XSX (Xbox series X) blades alongside the existing XOS (Xbox One S) blades, so it seems they're going to use the XSX blades for XSX-only games or if the player wants to play games at 120Hz or 4K. It's not an upgrade from XOS to XSX, it's a phase-in of XSX alongside XOS.

 

[Recus]

They should use Azure, power of the Cloud, worked fine in Crackdown 3.

 

[Ashtr1x]

"Microsoft has its Xbox division, which has been in the gaming industry for a long time" yeah they do. But their gaming prowess is dead and defunct. Their Halo MCC a decade old port on Steam and has been in works since last year Q3 has so many bugs like Audio is broken on Reach, Halo CEA has crappy 3D audio because of EAX removal from PC and it has 30fps animation issues, Input latency is there on all MCC, then you have unstable 60fps on all titles. Pay in advance for the whole and get bugged trash. Halo 5 was a disaster in making before that which killed the IP by making Cortana go 180 flip , thanks to Male patriarchy, same with Gears of War, which is dead, Gears 5 is a crappy game with Gears tacked on it with feminist notion, uglified Kait for the progressive nonsense and they want more of it with the flags and worst of all the game lost it's atmospheric impact and the weapon impact, it's not a Gears of War title anymore. Go to YT and watch Crowbcat's Gears video, before any arugments, because there's none to counter.

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.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

:facepalm:

is all I will say.

 

[jeremyshaw]

Amusingly, with how well the xbox one s and xbox one x's performance differences vs the xbox one were handled, MSFT can even afford to further cut down on the execution resources of the xCloud servers. Taking all of the lower yield XSX chips. "Oh no, how will I ever see over this 4Mbps 1080p stream, the lack of 4k high res details?" This would lend a lot of credence to the rumor that MSFT's XSX BOM is lower than Sony's, despite the main BOM muncher, the SoC die, being larger.


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.

 

[Totally]

Ohohoho, is MS already planning to pad their sales numbers?