Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Microsoft and Sony strike games streaming deal
Dragnelus
Member EpicPosts: 3,503
Microsoft and Sony have formed a partnership on video games streaming, despite being fierce competitors.
It is expected Sony will use Microsoft’s Azure cloud service to host its upcoming PlayStation streaming service.
Microsoft has been trialling a streaming offer of its own, under its Xbox brand.
The firms said they would also work together on semiconductors and artificial intelligence applications.
"For many years, Microsoft has been a key business partner for us, though of course the two companies have also been competing in some areas,” said Kenichio Yoshida, Sony’s chief executive.
“I believe that our joint development of future cloud solutions will contribute greatly to the advancement of interactive content.”
Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, said: "Sony has always been a leader in both entertainment and technology, and the collaboration we announced today builds on this history of innovation.”
Read more at:
Comments
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
OT: @FlyByKnight The fireworks in your animation are really irritating when one has to watch them about 100 times in a row while writing message
The options are to either use someone else's infrastructure or build your own. Microsfot, Amazon, and Google have the largest. Google already has stadia coming so they probably felt like they didn't want to deal with that and Microsoft probably gave them a better deal.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/case-studies/
Trying to emulate Nintendo Switch games on an ordinary GPU compute server would be dicier. Nvidia offers plenty of server GPUs, but they're built to connect to x86 or Power CPUs, not ARM, and trying to emulate ARM on something else could be trouble. If this is only for a future Nintendo console, that could be different.
It would surely be preferable to use ordinary GPU compute servers rather than custom hardware to match the exact console specs if they can. The question is whether they can. One previous announcement for Microsoft's own cloud showed them building custom servers with four Xbox One SoCs in each.
If you have to build custom hardware like that, then you run into scaling issues. Build too many, and if the demand doesn't come, then you have racks of servers sitting idle that you can't use for anything else. Build too few and people will think the service is bad because they have to sit in a queue for an hour to play a game. And you can't ramp it up and down quickly.
If you can use ordinary GPU compute servers, then you've got whatever capacity you need and can sell unneeded capacity for other compute purposes, even if your estimates of demand are off by a factor of five in either direction. Or even if demand varies wildly, both with time of day and also because of spikes as particularly popular games launch.
If they can do that, then for Sony and Nintendo to rely on Azure (or Amazon or some other established cloud provider) makes a ton of sense. If they can't, but are going to have racks of PS5 or Nintendo's next console, then the gains from having Microsoft handle it are much smaller.
What he means is....
Thanks to this partnership we can form a large monopoly and hopefully take over the entire market and run everyone else out of business.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.