pertinent posted:

What it means is instead of the traditional approach of having one big server covering a set geographical area or a set number of zones, they build an architecture that allows a pool of CPUs to have individual tasks delegated to them on demand.

The problem with the traditional approach is when you have too many people for a single server to handle, it just ends up making GBS threads itself. For reference, see any MMO ever. With their "cloud approach" however, you can theoretically just up the number of CPUs available in the CPU pool, and the technology behind the game should figure out on its own where those CPUs are in demand, and delegate tasks as needed.

Google's entire search infrastructure is based on an architecture like this, as are many of the biggest web services today, so it's not new technology per se, but it's definitely new in terms of building a game out of it.