Xbox has been the "market leader in North America for 3 quarters in a row amongst next gen consoles" says Satya Nadella

Are these still your positions?

I’m not sure anyone knows exactly how many are in racks, but I very much guarantee there’s at least an order of magnitude more than you’re suggesting at this point. We know a decent chunk of silicon from last year was dedicated for the server upgrades we also know occurred.

You state that there doesn’t need to be physical hardware or “millions of Xbox chips in racks”, but we know (directly from Xbox Engineers’ mouths) that four sessions of Xbox One titles are able to be run from one blade, but Series titles are a 1:1 relationship of one player per one blade. We also know exactly what silicon is on each blade (which is now the Series X APU) because we’ve seen them.

So I’m confused as to what specifically you’re implying is fan fiction?

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Of course this is still my position. Nothing has changed. Nobody who mentions these fantastical numbers has produced sources :woman_shrugging:

Fan fiction is millions of xbox chips in data centers. Thats not how it works and nobody has produced any source whatsoever for their fiction. I have, on the other hand, given some examples and sources how this all works :woman_shrugging:

The fact that the cloud exists and is playable isn’t proof enough?

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How is this proof for you assumption that millions of xCloud servers makes up the gap of around 5 million sales to PS5?

How??

1 million Fortnite players on xCloud (not concurrent) led to waiting queues. How is this possible with millions of servers?

Where’s your source that this gap is supposedly five million units?

Every statement I’ve made can be backed by articles and statements from Xbox; where’s your evidence to refute those statements, specifically the 1:1 ratio for Series games running on xCloud? I never said there were five million Series APUs in data centers but given what we know about xCloud usage, there’s proof that there’s likely at least a million there (and given what we know about reduced consumer shipments of Series silicon last year that just so happened to coincide with the Series upgrades to xCloud racks, it seems pretty safe to make that claim).

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https://twitter.com/Welfare_JBP has pretty good and well thought out estimates.

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The most recent tweet by him has a typo ‘Ganestop’. Very authoritative source you got there :sweat_smile:

Again, I’m asking for your sources for millions of Xbox chips in xCloud data centers.

I guess I find it more interesting that your hypothesis is that Xbox cloud servers must be few in number because Xbox would never sacrifice console sales.

That seems to be the entire basis of your position.

No, the basis of my position are simply the realities of data centers.

One thing I think everyone could agree on is that life would be a lot easier if Xbox provided numbers in their financial reports. Then at least there could be official numbers. :handshake:

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Okay so not an actual source. Got it. As @Shpeshal_Nick has implied many a time, that gap that’s being regurgitated without any viable data is most likely a lot less.

Here’s some of my sources btw:

So there’s at least four months of a portion of Series silicon directed to xCloud upgrades. Data centers often do have several hundred thousand CPU+GPU and/or APUs at each site btw; where I work has two of the fastest supercomputers on the planet and they’d be considered “baby-data centers” in terms of CPU count, and we still have several thousand CPUs alone in roughly a twentieth the footprint of the average Azure DC. You’re assuming that these are VMs running in Xeons or Epyc cores, but that’s factually inaccurate in this case as Microsoft have explicitly stated (and again, shown the blades themselves). So what you’re implying about the “realities of data centers” is also inaccurate (most large scale data centers actually do have millions of servers - read: millions of CPUs).

https://www.racksolutions.com/news/blog/how-many-servers-does-a-data-center-have/

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When you put together those articles it helps to give a good picture even though Xbox loves being tight lipped about it’s official numbers. Sometimes you just have to read between the lines.

The biggest indicator that Xbox has a million + series X chips in its servers is the recent launch of the Samsung smart tv app. Xbox clearly feels confident that they will meet the demand of such a partnership.

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Of course Microsoft financial reports are valid sources. Welfare does good estimates from that. Whats Nicks source? Yeah.

I never denied that Microsoft put some portion of their silicon in server racks. Your sources don’t mention anywhere any numbers.This portion of yours could be anywhere from 4 pieces to 4 million. Thats not a source for millions of xCloud server chips :woman_shrugging:

What? Where did i do any of that?

From your work in data centers you know their millions of cpus don’t implode, when 1 million players (and not even concurrently!) want to play Fortnite. Facts.

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Look you are just way over complicating things. Ask yourself this: would Samsung partner with Xbox if there wasn’t a million plus series Cloud servers?

How many new model tv do Samsung sell in a year ? The xcloud thing is only for 2022 models

Well its a weird thing. Planet Earth is split into time zones where humans are awake and asleep on different sides of the planet at any given time. So 1 Xbox Blade in the cloud can be used by 10-20 gamers every day.

Though its pretty obvious how Xbox prioritises. Theres a console shortage, and Microsoft decided that it was better to put millions of units in the cloud then millions of units in gamers homes.

All we know is Xbox started outselling PS5 globally just after they finished upgrading the data centers, so its certainly a meaningful amount.

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Game Streaming is a low latency application of streaming, which means the hardware needs to be located as close to the user as reasonable. You can’t use a US server to serve Japanese users when US has low utilization because it’d be a bad experience.

They need enough hardware in each region to serve the users in that region.

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This so much this is what a lot do not understand about data centres or streaming. even more pin point in North America we have 2/3 data centres just for the east coast