Yeah... Three XbO's power available... through internet... This is just so stupid I don't know where to begin.
Cloud computation is usable in two ways: Either you have an the entire game running in the cloud, i.e. like gaikai, or you do heavy computation there, like on supercomputers trying to calculate quantum field dynamics. I doubt there are many gamers thrilled that MS is offering computational power for their physics simulations, so I think this essentially means that they are wanting to say they are announcing their own gaikai type service.
Then someone might ask "but can't you just use it as additional computational power for games?", the answer is a simple FUCK NO. Let me explain why.
First, let's look at "you can help load times":
Transfer rate from a mechanical harddrive to RAM: typically around 50-90 MB/s, depending on fragmentation. Transfer rate from an SSD to RAM: Typically 300-500 MB/s. 6x Blu-ray: 27 MB/s Transfer from internet (25Mbit line, this is rather high end for a lot of people) to RAM: 3 MB/s.
Latency: Typical hard drive: 1-10ms. typical SSD: 10-100 microsecs (0.001-0.10ms). Blu-ray: 10-100ms Internet: 10-100ms, assuming ideal conditions....
Now let's look at ram -> processor:
RAM generally has a latency at about n clock cycles, depending on the RAM. The PS4 GDDR5 RAM has about 50GB/s bandwidth. A 1GHz clocked processor will mean that it has n nanoseconds in latency. Basically, the absolute upper limit for RAM latency is 10ns, most likely it's only 2-3 cycles, if not just one. Let's compare 10 ns to 10 ms. That is a difference of a million times. This means quite simply that any "assisted computation" must be completed entirely on the cloud, to then be brought back to the console, and it will have to have used over 10 million clock cycles to go break even. What does this mean? This means that the assisted computation will have to handle a beast that requires millions upon millions of calculations before yielding usable results. This simply does not happen unless you are writing the most jacked up code in the world.
Well, there's one thing that it can do: host multiplayer. This is probably what this server park will end up doing as it is friggin worthless otherwise. So yay, their stupidity will give you proper online multiplayer again at least.
Quite simply put, this is the perfect example of "behind the desk genius" as we call it in Norway. Something that looks good on paper, but is UTTER BULLSHIT to do practically.
It would have been cool if I could have bought one to use it for my master thesis' computational part. I can't think of any other way to use it.
