Xbox One has the power of more than 10 Xbox 360s

 

The Xbox One has the "computational power of more than 10 Xbox 360 consoles," Microsoft has revealed during a behind closed-doors session titled "Xbox 101". And that's before the power of the cloud is taken into consideration.

That's according to Xbox One engineering manager Jeff Henshaw who showed off the power of the cloud using real data from NASA in order to track asteroids in space.Offline – using only the power of the Xbox One – the orbital velocity of 40,000 asteroids was able to be tracked. Using the cloud this number was upped to 330,000.

"Microsoft has hundreds of thousands of servers and dozens of data centres geographically distributed all around the planet, and Xbox One has the ability to instantly tap in to that limitless computational horsepower," Henshaw explained.

The Xbox One is the upcoming third video game console developed by and produced for Microsoft and the successor to the Xbox 360. The Xbox One will compete with Sony's PlayStation 4 and Nintendo's Wii U as part of the eighth generation of video game consoles. It is scheduled for a November 2013 release.

The Xbox One has 8GB of RAM, along with a Blu-ray drive, as well as a native 64-bit architecture, a 500GB onboard hard drive, HDMI in and out (including passthrough capabilities for use with your existing home theatre setup), 802.11n Wi-Fi as well as an 8-core CPU and USB 3.0 connectivity. The next-generation Xbox will run three operating systems simultaneously. Complementing Windows 8 and RT on PCs and tablets, there will be a third distinct version of Microsoft's operating system that has been pared down specifically for the new console.

 
 

The console was announced on 21 May 2013.Updates to the licensing agreements were published on June 6, 2013He added that "any device doing the computational math to realistically in real-time chart the orbital velocity of 330,000 asteroids would melt a hole in the ground, but Xbox One is able to do it without even breaking a sweat because it's pulling in virtualised cloud computing resources."All this means game developers can do things which weren't possible before.

"Game developers are building games that have bigger levels than ever before. In fact, game developers can now create persistent worlds that encompass tens or hundreds of thousands of players without taxing any individual console, and those worlds that they built can be lusher and more vibrant than ever before because the cloud persists and is always there, always computing," Henshaw explains.

"Those worlds can live on in between game sessions. If one player drops out, that world will continue on and can experience the effects of time, like wear from weather damage, so that when a player comes back into the universe it's actually a slightly evolved place in the same way that our real world evolves a little bit from the time we go to sleep to the time we wake up. Game developers have given us incredibly positive feedback on the crazy different ways that they can use this incredible new cloud power resource."

As a side note, Henshaw said that even when being stressed the Xbox One operates almost silently.It remains to be seen if the cloud makes the Xbox One's strict policies relating to online connectivity worth putting up with.