Xbox Addict

Will "The Cloud" make Xbox One more powerful?

According to Jeff Henshaw, group program manager of Xbox Incubation & Prototyping, the cloud’s muscle means that your Xbox One isn’t, effectively, an Xbox One, but an Xbox Three. See what I did there, etc.

"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," he 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."

According to Xbox Live corporate VP Marc Whitten, the manufacturer actually dialled back development of Xbox 360’s successor till it was confident that it could deliver a genuine technological leap.

"Frankly a lot of people have said ’hey, stuff looks pretty cool on Xbox 360 - do we need more power?" he told OXM. "Is my TV going to be powerful enough?’ And in fact, until we found that we’d got to a place where the stories could be different, the experience could be different, we didn’t want to ship a next generation console.

"We’ve been using the Xbox 360 to continue to revive the experience, to go deeper. But it is clear that with power the types of stories you can do are fundamentally different."

Update - Here’s a variation on the theme from Xbox Australia spokesman Adam Pollington, via Stevivor.

"It’s also been stated that the Xbox One is ten times more powerful than the Xbox 360, so we’re effectively 40 times greater than the Xbox 360 in terms of processing capabilities [using the cloud]. If you look to the cloud as something that is no doubt going to evolve and grow over time, it really spells out that there’s no limit to where the processing power of Xbox One can go.

"I think that’s a very exciting proposition, not only for Australians, but anyone else who’s going to pick up the Xbox One console."

Update 2 - the bods at Digital Foundry have subjected the above claims to extensive examination. Worth a read.