Personally, I could see 1.5-2 million Series X in datacenters, with more being added as more and more regions joins in. I’m guessing they made a big push early on and will slowly add over time, as well as depending on their numbers as they are the only ones that know live usage.
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I’m extremely layman on this subject, so sorry if my question seems silly. So, for example, if there are 10 people wanting to start their sessions, but if a data center has only 5 blades available, 5 will be able to play and the other 5 will be queued?
Yeah
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Using a server blade in USA at night to stream xCloud in India at day would be useless because of the latency
Of course Xbox has millions of units in servers. Just the number of countries they supply with xCloud makes this a must.
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Didn’t Fortnite bring in a million new players on xcloud alone? Shouldn’t this be pretty suggestive of how many Series X APUs are out there? Since they would have to support these users along with the regular stream of users.
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I think it’s pretty challenging to infer anything from the data we have because we don’t know anything about concurrent users or geographic distribution of users.
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We do know they aren’t leading globally during those 3 quarters referenced since Satya would have said so. We also have hints provided by the revenues reported. So there is info that constrains thoughtful estimates by providing a ceiling.
Early in the PS3 days Sony quite literally counted units made at a factory as ‘sold/shipped’ despite the fact they were actually just shipped to another Sony warehouse waiting for retailers to have interest in buying them. Since PS3 didn’t sell great early on retail didn’t need them for a lil bit and Sony would have had a quarter of negative ‘sales’ [shipments] had they not altered the terms they used in their fiscal reporting.
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Agree with most of that but wanted to note that they had 300,000 servers for XBL in general as of Xbox One’s launch. And iirc they were planning to grow that back then significantly, but can’t dig up the quote for the subsequent growth plans (think Phil said it). I think a lot of that is what turned into xCloud…?
I definitely second your point about Welfare as a reliable source too. He is legit and isn’t just randomly guessing.
We do know xCloud is spread across 54 Azure data centers in 140 countries. So there’s that tidbit. Not sure how much that helps tho. /shrugs
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Its challenging. Would be easier if some journalist would just ask them 
We know they had 10 million users on xCloud over ~18 months (this was reported at Build iirc) and 4 million users with Fortnite over 2 months (all of this is not concurrent). The latter led to worldwide waiting queues. They also shared more info behind the scenes later and said they plan to double their capacity (thousands of server racks). We also know they could pack 8 Xbox One S chips in a 2U rack, but i highly doubt this density is possible with Series X chips. So in the end napkin math says there will be couple hundred thousand of units in use.
Napkin math says that if there are 2 million Series X chips then you are off by 90%. All because you refuse to believe a company would sacrifice console sales during a chip shortage.
So in your world Xbox has ten thousand Series X servers per country/ data center?
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Read what I said. You’re attributing statements I never made; all my sources I provided backed up exactly what I stated in my original post - again I never said there was a five million unit gap or that there are five million Series APUs in datacenters - I specifically highlighted the periods in which the servers were being upgraded with Series hardware and how it aligns with smaller shipments of Xbox Series consoles.
Putting “facts” at the end of a statement doesn’t make it any more true. So you’re just being combative and pulling things out of thin air, only proving more my point about how false your statement of “the realities of the datacenter” actually is. Let me explain it like you’re five: a large-scale data center often does have millions of servers (therefore CPUs) which often run multiple VMs for multiple functions and loads; the Series blades in datacenters are literally Xbox Series APUs (the same things that go into Xbox consoles to make them run) and unlike that usage I described earlier, every Xbox Series game running via xCloud requires one Series APU in those XCloud blades.
If you don’t think, with the knowledge that the Cloud Gaming initiative experienced exponential growth over the last year and the now-available Samsung-XCloud partnership, that Microsoft has allocated at least a million APUs to handle peak xCloud usage, you’re fooling yourself. Remember while four Xbox One game sessions can run on each Series blade, only one player/session of Xbox Series titles run on each blade.
FYI - it wasn’t one million players on Fortnite via xCloud, it was four million. It’s true that we don’t know concurrent users for that title or for the 10+ million (as of April), but any basic knowledge of datacenters, xCloud configurations, and growth/load-balancing calculations would support the argument that there’s a fair amount more Series silicon allocated to xCloud than you’re giving credit.
Until Microsoft specifically states how many consoles have actually been sold, any “analysis” is guessing.
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It’s especially asinine when Microsoft has clearly positioned Cloud as their driver for this generation - I’m not sure how many announcements and partnerships with developers and manufacturers (like Samsung) it will take to make it sink in that that’s the case. This is their long-term, two-pronged strategy and I would happily wager they’ve set aside at least a million APUs for that purpose. The fact that it hasn’t sunk in that xCloud is different than your typical server configuration is part of the problem…
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You can’t prove that 2=3
And also
You can’t prove that 2=1
But I can prove that 2>1 and 2<3
And that’s the answer to this circling argument of xCloud install numbers
Please let’s put an end to this
I would like to add that to my knowledge, Fortnite is a Series X game as well…
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This tone is a no from me. Your posts provided not a single source with any numbers whatsoever, so this attitude is really off.
Again, you are pulling numbers out of thin air. Please provide a valid source for “at least a million APUs”.
Lets hear from a person with a ‘basic knowledge of datacenters’:
“using this hardware in the cloud environment allows us to reach hundreds more players per server over its lifetime.”
“hundrets”. thats the sizing factor Microsoft themselves uses.
Thats absolutely in line with what i argued here. So I feel I’m in very good company.
From the damn article, “Microsoft is now working to eventually transition these xCloud servers to the Xbox Series X processor. This next-gen processor is far more powerful and capable of running four Xbox One S game sessions simultaneously on a single chip. It also includes a new built-in video encoder that is up to six times faster than the current external encoder that Microsoft uses on existing xCloud servers.”
I’m not pulling anything out of thin air here, I assumed you knew it was common knowledge that a single physical server is made up of several “blades”. Before the switch to Series X APUs in these blades, there were eight One S APUs per blade (it was in fact in the server rack article I provided as an additional source). We don’t know what the current APU count per blade is but we can safely predict it is at least two, when you calculate for die size and thermals. It’s also common knowledge since 2020 that the Series X chipset will be able to run four Xbox One/360 sessions per APU, and is a one:one relationship for Xbox Series X sessions (one player=one chip). This is not disproven by the statement from Jenn’s Social Good group; again, remember that there are dozens of blades per rack, so the math for “hundreds per server” seems accurate and does not negate anything I’ve said. Furthermore, I have provided sources for everything I’ve stated (from the amount of chips present in your average datacenter, to the rollout of Series xCloud upgrades coinciding with lower Xbox shipments, etc.).
Do I know exactly how many APUs there are in the data centers? No. Have I ever said there were five million, like you accused me of? No. I do know from the scale of xcloud’s rollout, usage, basic datacenter knowledge, and the information we do have about the configuration of the blades in each xCloud server, that it’s a pretty safe bet to conclude there’s very likely at least a million Series chips designated to them.
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@Knottian isn’t having a go at you. At least I don’t think he is. To explain something as though someone is five is just a common saying, at least here in the US. It essentially means that he’s breaking things down into layman’s terms.
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So if they have a million servers at any given moment, eventually it will be the equivilent of 100m consoles in homes.