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Xbox One will sit in your living room and burn through not the paltry 1.2 teraflops of computing power as was rumoured, but almost five teraflops - as much as the flagship £800 NVIDIA Titan graphics card. And then it will get faster and faster over time. At least, that's if the latest Microsoft PR campaign is to be believed. But how realistic is it to move game processing to "the cloud" and keep adding to the resources developers have available? Do Microsoft's claims have any basis in reality? Is this a tactical play to compete against the tangibly superior fixed-spec of the PlayStation 4 or is this really just wishful thinking?Prior to Xbox One's reveal, gamers were already well-informed of the hardware specs thanks primarily to the Microsoft whitepaper leaks found on VGLeaks. Next to PS4, Durango, as it was known, looked like a significantly less capable machine - the same CPU but with lower memory bandwidth and an inferior graphics core. But anyone watching the reveal and subsequent architecture interviews with Microsoft's Larry Hryb will have seen a concerted effort by the firm to address this with numerous references to "the power of the cloud".
Marc Whitten, chief product officer, described the upgrading of Live to 300,000 servers and put the computational power into perspective by suggesting that this would have enough CPU power to match the potential of every computer in the world, judged by 1999 standards. Matt Booty, general manager of Redmond Game Studios and Platforms, recently told Ars Technica, "a rule of thumb we like to use is that [for] every Xbox One available in your living room we'll have three of those devices in the cloud available," suggesting some 5TF of processing power for your games, a sentiment echoing Australian Microsoft spokesperon Adam Pollington's assertion that Xbox One was 40 times more powerful than the Xbox 360.
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