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OnLive was both before the Cloud era (where they manually had to maintain many points of presence that were near consumers and they didn't have the money to do

OnLive was both before the Cloud era (where they manually had to maintain many points of presence that were near consumers and they didn't have the money to do it near what Google, Amazon and Microsoft are able to do) and before GPUs were really mainstream for in normal data center servers to the scale this type of service requires.

ehsankia 8y ago
Key quote from the linked article: > the company had deployed thousands of servers that were sitting unused, and only ever had 1,600 concurrent users of the service worldwide They were burning through all of their money because they highly overestimated the audience. That's one of the main problems the cloud was made to solve.
- Const-me 8y ago
  This particular cloud will only solve the problem if google will find a way to sell the time of these AMD GPUs to someone else. Traditional GPGPU customers, and machine learners, usually use CUDA instead of OpenCL / VulkanCompute / DirectCompute. At least from my position is looks that way. I’m a freelance developer and my clients are picking CUDA in ~75% cases. The rest is DirectCompute, if computing on client PCs and hardware compatibility is required.
rasz 8y ago
Economics were not the main problem with OnLive, it simply didnt work from the players perspective.
- KallDrexx 8y ago
  Right partially because OnLive couldn't spend the money required to put servers close enough to give users a good experience. It would have taken a monumental amount of money for them to expand in a way that would facilitate that, and custom make servers that had consumer grade GPUs in them. Furthermore, there are other technological advances that have come even in the past 2 years that help facilitate this, like Secure Reliable Transport protocol (https://www.srtalliance.org/ https://www.srtalliance.org/). Things were just too stacked against OnLive at the time to make it work, but most of those barriers have since been removed after they had gone under.
  - rasz 8y ago
    OnLive didnt work (good enough) even if you lived next door to their servers.

ehsankia 8y ago

Key quote from the linked article: > the company had deployed thousands of servers that were sitting unused, and only ever had 1,600 concurrent users of the service worldwide They were burning through all of their money because they highly overestimated the audience. That's one of the main problems the cloud was made to solve.

Const-me 8y ago
This particular cloud will only solve the problem if google will find a way to sell the time of these AMD GPUs to someone else. Traditional GPGPU customers, and machine learners, usually use CUDA instead of OpenCL / VulkanCompute / DirectCompute. At least from my position is looks that way. I’m a freelance developer and my clients are picking CUDA in ~75% cases. The rest is DirectCompute, if computing on client PCs and hardware compatibility is required.

rasz 8y ago

Economics were not the main problem with OnLive, it simply didnt work from the players perspective.

KallDrexx 8y ago
Right partially because OnLive couldn't spend the money required to put servers close enough to give users a good experience. It would have taken a monumental amount of money for them to expand in a way that would facilitate that, and custom make servers that had consumer grade GPUs in them. Furthermore, there are other technological advances that have come even in the past 2 years that help facilitate this, like Secure Reliable Transport protocol (https://www.srtalliance.org/ https://www.srtalliance.org/). Things were just too stacked against OnLive at the time to make it work, but most of those barriers have since been removed after they had gone under.
- rasz 8y ago
  OnLive didnt work (good enough) even if you lived next door to their servers.