Another Important Workload Moves Towards the Cloud Pushing for Higher Speed Networking
Google recently announced its gaming Cloud service, Stadia. Stadia is the start of an important trend of moving rendering of games and other video content to the Cloud and away from devices. As the technology evolves, the Cloud will be capable of 8K video games that are seamless to most users.
To help reduce latency and insure a premium gaming experience, Google’s approach includes about 7,500 edge nodes and a specialized controller which talks directly to Google’s Cloud. Stadia represents be a dramatic and significant shift in gaming. One that will allow casual gamers to play on familiar hardware devices without having to buy a new dedicated gaming system. It will also allow games to be updated without a user downloading patches, etc. This will potentially open the market to additional game developers, and it could also affect the fundamental business structure of the industry by moving it towards a subscription model. A Cloud approach will also let developers roll out or try different versions of games regionally. This could trigger complementary, highly targeted advertising revenue opportunities. Imagine, for example, a pizza shop in the game being rendered to a local business for advertising purposes.
Bringing this back to networking, the move towards Cloud rendered gaming is another new use case that will put additional networking demand and ports into the Cloud. The bandwidth and GPU intensity will only increase as developers and Google learn, grow and optimize the platform. The Cloud will continue to move rapidly towards higher speed technologies. This is a prime use case of 400 Gbps and why 800 Gbps is so important and needs to follow quickly. The networking industry will not only enjoy an increase in demand for overall bandwidth but will also benefit from the secondary high-speed network which will exist to connect these gaming clusters together internally.
Cloud rendered gaming will create incremental new high-speed TAM for networking suppliers. It is only one of several new use cases that Cloud companies can engage as their infrastructure becomes more robust and ubiquitous. In a way, one that drives both core and edge computing.
Credo is committed to leading the networking industry’s transition to higher speed by being first to market with next generation SerDes technologies. Credo’s 112Gbps SerDes are being deployed in a variety of forms including IP, chiplets, line card components, optical components, and Active Ethernet cables. The Credo technology supports nearly every connection made within a Data Center and provides the foundation to move to the 800G performance node.
