Moore’s Law means Gaming moves to the Cloud

Ten years ago, I worked on the System-on-Chip that would become the heart of the Xbox One game console. It was a dream job, but one I didn’t think would last long. Down the street in Mountain View a small company called OnLive¹ was developing revolutionary tech to enable game streaming from the cloud. I was sure that this was the future. Fast forward to 2022 and the Xbox Series X has been largely <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2022/07/05/xbox-series-x-may-be-finally-starting-to-keep-up-with-demand/?sh=3373331073cd" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">sold out</a>² while OnLive has <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/2/8337955/sony-buys-onlive-only-to-shut-it-down" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">gone bust</a>³. Looking back, there are many reasons I was wrong. The business model wasn’t ready, the networks weren’t reliable, and there was no killer app, no game that cloud streaming uniquely enabled. Still as my career progressed, I learned there was an even bigger reason — Moore’s Law. Back in 2012 computers, and especially smartphones, were always getting twice as fast. Why play laggy games from a server when consumer tech was always better? In 2022, things are changing. To quote Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang “Moore’s Law is dead … It’s completely over.”⁴ While this is an overstatement, it’s a fact that computer performance growth has slowed. This is changing the way we build systems and reviving innovation in the datacenter. Not only that, but there’s a new killer app on the horizon. One that runs especially well in the cloud. <a href="https://michaeltauberg.medium.com/moores-law-means-gaming-moves-to-the-cloud-376c244a4c94">Website</a>