Could AMD Have An Advantage With Microsoft Xbox Game Streaming?

Game streaming has become one of the hottest features in PC gaming over the course of the past few years, and as it becomes more and more ubiquitous, it has started to trickle into consoles. NVIDIA  did a ton to move the industry forward with GRID. With regards to game consoles, the Sony PlayStation 4 had game limited PS3 title streaming capabilities to Sony-only devices, and now Microsoft will have Xbox One game streaming capabilities with Microsoft Windows 10 PCs and tablets. This new feature presents new opportunities for PC hardware manufacturers to tailor their hardware to the needs of Microsoft Xbox One gamers, with some having unique advantages to meet those needs. With Advanced Micro Devices's new Carrizo chip, does it provide an advantage on this feature? I've provided a fly-over below, but if want more details, you can download our analyst brief here.

Microsoft Xbox One streaming becomes a big feature

With the recent announcements coming from Computex and E3, lots of people are looking to Windows 10 and Microsoft’s Xbox One for new gaming experiences. One of the newest gaming experiences is enabling Xbox One game streaming to a Microsoft Windows 10 PC, allowing gamers to play their Xbox One games on their PC and any other Microsoft Windows 10-enabled tablet.

One of the key technological features of this streaming capability is the ability to stream in the H.265/HEVC (high efficiency video coding) codec, making game streaming virtually indiscernible from playing direct on the Microsoft Xbox One, given good networking conditions. This is becoming an even more important feature thanks to Microsoft and Facebook's Oculus announcement that Microsoft will be supporting Oculus natively on Windows 10 and with Xbox One game streaming.

Advanced Micro Devices’s Carrizo steps in

At Computex 2015 in Taipei, Taiwan a few weeks ago, Advanced Micro Devices announced their new "Carrizo" APU (accelerated processing unit) for laptops, a processor that is specifically designed for HEVC video decoding. I wrote about it here.

Advanced Micro Devices’s Carrizo APU is able to do this thanks to a unique HEVC decoder component inside of the SoC that makes it uniquely effective at decoding HEVC and other video codecs. So, laptops powered by Carrizo APUs are not only capable of having smooth playback of video, but they are also able to do it with much less power thanks to this special feature of this APU. Efficiently decoding video effectively in a high quality manner the key to game streaming. It can't hurt either than Carrizo has  similar CPU and GPU technologies than the Xbox One itself. For precision purposes, I want to point out that they are not identical technologies, but similar.

Wrapping up

Advanced Micro Devices does, in fact, have advantages on Microsoft Xbox One game streaming when it comes to integrated graphics in an SoC, and a Carrizo-based notebook would make an excellent solution for this use case.

To read more about Advanced Micro Devices capabilities in Xbox One game streaming,  you can download our analyst brief here.

You can find Patrick Moorhead, President & Principal Analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy on the web, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

Note: This blog contains contribution from Anshel Sag, technologist and staff writer for Moor Insights & Strategy. 

Disclosure: My firm, Moor Insights & Strategy, like all research and analyst firms, provides or has provided research, analysis, advising, and/or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry, including Advanced Micro Devices, Microsoft, NVIDIA, cited in this article. No employees at the firm hold any equity positions with any companies cited in this column.