While Microsoft has touted its Azure-based cloud computing to help power Xbox One games, Sony plans to launch its Gaikai-powered cloud gaming service in 2014 that will stream Playstation 3 games to the PS4, PS3 and PS Vita. It appears that Microsoft is working on game streaming as well though and showed off Halo 4 being streamed to a Windows Phone during a company meeting Thursday.
The report comes from Twitter posts made by Winsupersite.com blogger and insider Paul Thurrott and With inWindows blogger Rafael Rivera who says he was at the meeting.Thurrott was first to tweet the news when he wrote, "Microsoft apparently showed Halo4 running on Windows Phone at its annual company meeting. Not clear if this is something "happening" or demo."
Both Rivera and Thurrott then made follow-up posts that indicate that the demo was an Azure-based cloud streaming demo that ran on multiple devices. Presumably this includes Windows 8 based tablets as well.
Lag or latency is a major issue with any sort of cloud-streaming game service but Rivera says that Microsoft has gotten it down to 45ms which is respectable for an unreleased product compared to the 100+ms times reported for the OnLive streaming service. This is all very dependent on the location of the user and the quality of the ISP so it could be very different in the real world.
It is not possible for either the Xbox One or PS4 to be backwards compatible with games on current-gen consoles due to the shift from specialized architectures to a more general x86 architecture. Sony plans to partially get around this issue with cloud gaming but now it appears that Microsoft has something planned for the Xbox One as well.
In recent weeks Microsoft has leased large chunks of server space in data centers in Silicon Valley and northern Virginia, two key hubs for Internet traffic. The latest leases, which total about 9.4 megawatts of critical power, establish Microsoft as the biggest fish in the market for super wholesale tenants: cloud builders who can lease vast chunks of server space. This group of companies – which also includes Facebook, Apple and Rackspace – can use their scale as leverage in pricing, and sometimes get discounts by working deals for space in multiple markets.
That appears to be what Microsoft did last month, when it lined up large leases with data center developer DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) in Santa Clara, Calif. and Reston, Virginia. DFT doesn’t identify its tenants, but said recently that a Fortune 50 customer had leased 6.83 megawatts of space in Santa Clara, Calif. and another 2.6 megawatts of power in Reston, Virginia. An analysis of DFT’s leasing and known customer base makes it clear that the tenant is Microsoft.
Microsoft wouldn’t comment on its latest leasing activity, other than to confirm that it uses both leased and company-owned data centers.In 2012 Microsoft added more wholesale space than any other company, according to a report from realty firm Avison Young, leasing 12 megawatts of space from DuPont Fabros across facilities in Santa Clara, Chicago and Virginia. Add in the new deals, and Microsoft has leased more than 21 megawatts of wholesale space in the last 15 months.
Meanwhile, the company continues to build its own data centers in Singapore and four markets in the United States – Quincy, Washington; Boydton, Virginia; West Des Moines, Iowa; and Cheyenne, Wyoming. This week Microsoft said it would also invest $250 million to build a new data center in Finland.
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