There are many things this could be used for. It's how Siri works on your iOS device for example, so voice recognition. Another idea is simulating a large game world; if this were done in the cloud it would mean worlds could be endlessly scaleable. What you see is limited by draw distance but the world goes out far beyond and stuff is loaded only as it comes into view, so a few ms delay won't be noticeable. Or in a multiplayer game's single player mode the AI bots could be in the cloud, running very sophisticated AI that doesn't task your console – their latency could be managed like regular players in multiplayer.arron wrote:Now they're claiming that it will be moving calculations off your local XBox onto the cloud to boost the power of your console. Now I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the network latency of doing this will be far in excess of doing the same work locally on your processor cores and local memory.
The interesting thing is what incentives will there be for developers. Developers could already do this if they wanted, offloading tasks to servers. But they'd have to deal with the cost, the complexity, performance/latency and how to handle not being online, and so rarely if ever bother. Presumably MS will offer solutions to some or all of these.
