

Analysis of the OnLive "cloud console" system - zemaj
http://palgn.com.au/article.php?id=13939

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zemaj
Wrote this article last night. It's really got me thinking about the
implications for web apps. If they really have got sub 100ms response times it
could revolutionise web app delivery. It solves massive issues surrounding
virtual worlds too. All graphics processing is done at the server. Amazing
stuff if it really does work.

~~~
bilbo0s
It is doubtful that this will perform well on the load that one would need to
service the video gamers who would want to use it, read ... everyone. Let's
see 140 million PS2's, 20 million PS3's, 45 million Wii's, and right around 27
million xbox 360's. I'll be generous and not count the kids still gaming on
the original xbox. That makes about 233 million possible customers. Let's be
nice again and suppose that only 1% of those people are interested in worry
free, console free, multiplayer high end gaming via the net. I know, the real
number is at least an order of magnitude higher, but I'm being kind. That
brings us to 2.3 million people hitting these servers a night, all of them
pulling down a 720p stream. Nightly bandwidth cost? Now consider the computing
horse power needed to generate and then compress all of those streams. Amazon
EC2 is not going to get you there.

But let's suppose all of this works as advertised!

There is no way Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo would NOT compete against you in
that market, the only question is when will they make their entry.

Or maybe the sleeping tigers. NVidia, Intel, and to a lesser extent AMD. They
come along and put extensions in their drivers that work only on their clouds.
Programmers have to use NVidia's drivers anyway, they do not need to use this
company's SDK however.

But by far the greatest concern of this company should be Apple. By making
their product hardware and server software based, they are putting themselves
on terrain that Apple knows FAR better than they. In fact, Apple knows it far
better than anyone in the gaming industry. This is exactly the mistake the
music industry made. I remember video of a guy from Sony and Universal
laughing at the first iPod. What could Apple do? Well they could come along
and revolutionize your revolutionary technology. Like, say, building an Apple
gaming cloud that only talks to the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the new
iTVGameConsole. And vice versa. They could even make an online store to buy
games for their cloud. They might call it like . . . I don't know . . . iTunes
Media Store, or something like that.

I am not sanguine about this company's future. But the future for technology
like this is pretty bright. I'll put my money on an Apple partnership with
NVidia.

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John_Galt
Hardware seems to get cheaper/better faster than networks do. Also the trend
in networking is bigger bands not lower latency. Someday cloud based low
latency apps will work, but I doubt this will happen anytime soon.

The real news here is that compression card they have created. The article
doesn't go into detail but large scale 1ms compression?!

What it would take to make this work: A unified, or at least more unified
internet topology. Latency occurs at the gateways/modems/MUXes where you are
translating from one type of packet to another. Perhaps you could get around
enough of that with peering... hmmm Ultimately I just don't see a lot of
applications requiring this kind of latency so OnLive will be swimming
upstream.

