Xbox One to use Azure-based cloud computing to quadruple performance

Grazed from Expert Review. Author: Gareth Halfacree.

Microsoft has promised that it will add cloud computing capabilities equivalent to three Xbox One systems for every single console sold, allowing developers to tap into remote servers and create more complex games. The Xbox One is built around a semi-custom AMD accelerated processing unit (APU,) a chip that combines graphics and general-purpose processing units. Using a different instruction set architecture – x86, the same as a standard desktop or laptop machine – than the PowerPC-based Xbox 360, it’s difficult to directly compare the relative performance of the two systems, with Microsoft stating the Xbox One will be roughly ten times as powerful as the Xbox 360.

Speaking to Official Xbox Magazine, Microsoft’s Jeff Henshaw has also suggested that each Xbox One console can tap into three times its local power by using an arm of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform – creating a device potentially 40 times as powerful as its predecessor…

"We’re provisioning, for developers, for every physical Xbox One we build, we’re provisioning the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox Ones on the cloud," Henshaw, Microsoft’s group programme manager of Xbox Incubation and Prototyping, said. "We’re doing that flat out so that any game developer can assume that there’s roughly three times the resources immediately available to their game, so they can build bigger, persistent levels that are more inclusive for players. They can do that out of the gate."…

Read more from the source @ http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/games/1299988/xbox-one-could-use-azure-based-cloud-computing-top-quadruple-performance