Microsoft's xCloud is a Push Towards Game Streaming Future, Powered by AMD

Microsoft has announced their xCloud initiative, a game streaming effort that looks to bridge the gap between local and stream-based gaming. xCloud is looking to bring true, platform-agnostic gaming with much lower bandwidth requirements due to a number of technologies being researched and worked on by Microsoft. Chief among these are low-latency networking, encoding, and decoding advances - all crucial parts of the puzzle for solving latency and poor image quality issues. xCloud aims to allow for "high-quality experiences at the lowest possible bitrates that work across the widest possible networks" - with 4G and 5G support. For now, the test version of xCloud only requires a minimum 10 Mbps connection, which is already very impressive in abstract - though of course it would require more info on the rendering specs being delivered to the recipient's system for deeper analysis.

One big takeaway here is that this xCloud initiative is fully powered by AMD's own hardware - as it should be. Using AMD custom hardware such as that found within Microsoft's Xbox consoles takes away the work and investment in building even more emulation capabilities on a server level, which would only add additional overhead to the streaming service. By using AMD's own custom hardware, Microsoft circumvents this issue - but entrenches itself even more on AMD's own product portfolio, both now and in the foreseeable future.

For AMD, this is amazing news - more volume of parts being shipped rather than just for the console market means increased revenues, but more importantly, this is a big win in the server space for the company. AMD's custom silicon strategy started with a market penetration outlook of offering the cheapest custom x86 and graphics IP technologies, but now? AMD has made itself the only player in this game, and everybody knows the first step to remain relevant is to make one virtually irreplaceable. I can't really overstate how important this could be for AMD's long-term future - they're crossing the bridge between offering localized hardware solutions (game consoles) through to the (for some) unavoidable future of game streaming.Microsoft will be rolling out xCloud in steps over its Azure data centers worldwide, throughout 54 'regions' and 140 countries. Microsoft has already rolled out its custom server racks into one of its data centers in the US, and public trials for the game streaming service are scheduled to begin in 2019.