Regarding the recent NVidia Keynote

[Montiness]

Hello,

I'll keep this brief.

Last Night (AU time) NVidia released their keynote, and a major part of that was the new tech bought to data centers.

Question is simple, now that NVidia had 10th'd the price of setting up a datacenter, and I expect Square is a company that jumps on this kind of thing and will probably already be planning updating theirs, can we please finally have an AU server as well?

Thank you for your time, all the best!

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

So, you misunderstood a few things here.

They are specifically talking about 10x less the cost of setting up an AI/deep learning build (read as set of servers) within a datacenter. A datacenter is just a physical location where servers are located.

This would likely do nothing for SE, which does not do deep learning/ai.

Also, the reasons behind no AU server is simple. You need enough people to populate the queues and keep instances being able to run. One server is all you would be able to get, maybe 2. Not enough to make the cost worth it. Especially as people would have to leave friends/groups/etc to move there.

[Montiness]

Nothing misunderstood. Although they targeted that market, you will notice that the base operation is the same. It can process data, any data, faster, cheaper, and in less physical space....

so the point and question is valid.

[Esmoire]

For the topic of Australian datacentres, if anything happens I imagine it would be a general Oceanic DC. I understand that while a lot of people from Australia, NZ, and SEA crowd Tonberry and Kujata, a good deal of those players are somewhat displaced over EU and NA as well. If we theoretically had some kind of huge incentive to encourage them to relocate to a new DC (abandoning a lot of their friends), then it was properly promoted (since a lot of people in those regions were turned off from the lack of servers to start), I'd generously imagine we can saturate four or so worlds if we ballpark them at 10k~ regularly active players each, going with numbers comparable to other worlds.

While the thesis of the thread is iffy, I do like the of regularly bringing up the conversation of supporting players in that region. Maybe they would want to make some overall system design improvements since queues for some activities will run a bit thin but it's not infeasible.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Nothing misunderstood. Although they targeted that market, you will notice that the base operation is the same. It can process data, any data, faster, cheaper, and in less physical space....

so the point and question is valid.

No. No it can't. That thing costs 200 grand. Each server for xiv likely costs around... 15-20k. One of those is 10 servers.

[MistakeNot]

Nothing misunderstood. Although they targeted that market, you will notice that the base operation is the same. It can process data, any data, faster, cheaper, and in less physical space....

so the point and question is valid.

The base operation is NOT the same. Nvidia's new cards are for those who need to do a lot of heavy computations. Game servers rarely need to do that - there are other parameters that are more important for them.
Besides, even if they could take advantage of Nvidia's cards it would require a certain (read: large) amount of tweaking and rewriting of the software to actually be able to take full advantage of them.

And even taking that into account, the actual hardware would be just one - relatively small - part of the cost for establishing a new physical datacenter.

[Neri]

Don't know how the AU datacenter is going to benefit us in SEA other than more people speaking English? Where would you put the datacenter though? In Australia? That's probably longer distance for us compared to Japan.

[Awha]

Sadly I do not think it is smart from a cost and even player perspective in the long run to have an AU server. Sure a some players would be happy but I doubt the population would warrant the cost of an AU only server this late in the game.

[Iscah]

Even being in the same data centre as Tonberry and Kujata, English speakers seem to be a minority. Lots of Japanese speakers in PF and roulettes, and you need to include Japanese in your language settings for duty finder or it has a big impact on queue times.

Maybe there's a lot of us if we all got grouped into one place, but it doesn't feel like enough.

Are there more solid stats about this than my gut feeling?

[LalaRu]

Even if new tech applies to an xiv server (and in this case it won't), do you really think to jump all your reliable-proven-working production assets on some new tech with no maturity nor experience at all? Running worldwide op centers isn't as playing with overclock on your pc.