Greetings HyperGate Pre-order Subscribers!
As many of you know, we have been communicating with the community on an
almost constant basis through our social media channels; namely on
Twitter, @LeapComputing, our Facebook page at
facebook.com/LeapComputing, and in the comments sections of the videos
on our YouTube channel. We have also been posting updates as to our
progress through these channels while also answering all emails sent to
[email protected].
However, it has come to our attention that there are some in the
pre-order community who have not visited these social media channels and
so are somewhat out of the loop regarding the goings on of Leap
Computing and the HyperGate Cloud PC Service project. Therefore we have
decided to initiate this Pre-order Subscriber Newsletter through which
the entire community will receive updates and information from time to
time. In this way, everybody will be able to keep up with what we're up
to.
In the following paragraphs we will touch on some updates that many of
you may already be aware of. If you have already seen these updates,
please just bear with us for the sake of the others. There is also new
information included for all, so please take a moment to read through,
even if you've been following our social media communications.
First off, it looks like the supported client-side operating systems on
day 1 of launch will be Windows & Android. Mac OS, iOS and Linux will be
coming very very soon after. We are just making sure that each client is
working properly so that you won't need to deal with day-zero bugs and
inconveniences. You will be able to use virtually any device running on
one of these operating systems to log on to your Cloud PC, provided it
is capable of streaming Netflix/YouTube in HD mode.
Furthermore, all HyperGate Cloud PCs will launch with a Windows 10
desktop! We have found that the Windows 10 operating system brings
advancements that will favorably affect the Cloud service and our tech
team has done a bang-up job integrating it into our Cloud PC protocol.
There is a brief video about this on our YouTube Channel.
Another feature you may not be aware of is that the Cloud PCs will
feature USB pass-through. This will work well with most peripherals
including game controllers!
Also, 1440p, 4K and multi-monitor support for the service are currently
in development. The work on these features is going very well and
support is expected to be added soon after launch!
Not surprisingly, the big question we keep getting is "When will the
service be launching?"
The answer to that at the current moment is that we are still on target
to have customers deployed and online by the end of the year. However,
we're sorry to say, this will not be everyone. By necessity we will
instead be deploying region by region and so not all subscribers will be
coming online at the same time.
There are a few reasons for this delay of a full global deployment on
day-one. The main reason for this is that AMD, one of our hardware
partners, will not be producing the dual-Fiji GPUs we've planned to use
for our deployment in the time-frame we were given to expect. We will
have very limited access to these GPUs by year's end, but not nearly
enough for a full deployment.
There are also other factors at play. Factors that were quite simply
unforeseeable and are not within our control. We have met each challenge
that we have encountered head on and dealt with them in the most
efficient and effective way possible. Many we have been able to overcome
through hard work and creative solutions. But as we've said many times,
this project really is a massive undertaking with an extraordinary
amount of moving parts and there are some factors that have affected our
timeline that have simply been out of our control.
We very much wanted to have all regions deployed by the end of this year
and as the year rolled on, we kept hammering away and refused to give up
on this goal. But at the end of the day, certain real life issues are
just taking more time to work through than we have left on the calendar.
The first regions to be deployed will be those closest to our
headquarters in Austin, Texas and we will work our way out from there.
We will continue bringing regions online as quickly and consistently as
possible and we will keep everyone in the community up to date on which
regions have been deployed and which we foresee coming online next.
This project has really been a gargantuan undertaking and in hindsight,
we gave ourselves a relatively short window of time (only about three
quarters of a year) to complete an incredibly ambitious project of
tremendous scope. Please know that we did so in good faith and have
worked tirelessly in trying to make it happen as projected.
In light of this, please consider some that the great milestones that
we've achieved in this relatively short period of time: The design and
engineering of our customized Cloud PC servers has been completed. This,
by itself, was a huge step. Not only does a process like this take an
incredible amount of time and hard work, but we really couldn't even
begin on it in earnest until several months after the beginning of
pre-orders.
To design a sufficiently efficient system for the purpose at hand, we
had to have a base level of data on how many ground-floor subscribers
we're expecting to build out for, and how they would be dispersed
geographically. That said, our tech team has done an amazing job in
creating a genuinely unique server platform with the help of our awesome
engineering partners at Gigabyte Technology. We have been testing the
engineering samples for awhile now and they are performing almost
exactly as we hoped! There is a video walkthrough of our revolutionary
Cloud PC servers on our You Tube channel.
We have also chosen and received a huge shipment of much more
conventional storage servers for our storage arrays, and these are also
performing very well in network tests with the service infrastructure.
Another thing that could not be done in earnest until we had sufficient
pre-order subscriber data was setting the placement of our initial
micro-datacenter locations around the world. This has taken a great many
calculations and tests to make sure that the subscribers in any given
region will have access to the best possible experience. There are of
course many other factors involved in this process based on the
infrastructure capabilities and rules & regulations of each region.
Another huge undertaking in which we have made major progress!
The important thing to remember in all this is that we are
essentially... you. By that I mean that we here at Leap Computing are by
and large avid gamers, tech enthusiasts and early adopters. As such we
have all, at one time or another pre-ordered a game or tech product or
service, the release of which was delayed greatly, or perhaps never
arrived at all. So we know the anticipation and anxiety that can be part
of supporting such a project. But as early adopters, we also know the
great feeling and excitement that comes when a product or service really
delivers and we have been supporting it the whole time. This is the main
reason we have been so determined to get this service online as close as
possible to the projected release timeframe, but also to do it the right
way. It's never satisfying when a service, game or product you've been
looking forward to finally arrives and it is full of bugs and barely
usable because it was rushed out. We've played enough MMOs to know how
off-putting a bad day-one experience can be. You can believe us when we
say that nobody is more eager to see all regions go live than we are,
and that we are working most diligently to get it up and running as
quickly as is possible.
In closing we want to offer our most sincere thanks and appreciation to
all of you! We can't tell you how much we appreciate the overwhelming
support we've received from so many of you in the months since we began
accepting pre-orders. It's this that really drives us on, strengthens
our resolve to get it right and keeps us going in those inevitable
frustrating moments when things just aren't going as planned. The sense
of community that we feel with all of you is such an important part of
this that it can't be overstated. So once again, thank you all so much
for being such a crucial part of this exciting and ground-breaking
adventure - you are truly what makes all the hard work worthwhile!
This will not be the last newsletter you will receive. In fact, as we go
forward in the deployment process you will be receiving more and more
updates as to what's going on. We realize that it's very important to
keep the lines of communication as open as possible and we mean to do
just that.
Oh, and one more thing. One of our excellent community members has
created a Leap Computing forum and has done a great job with it so far.
We encourage you to join in the conversation and information sharing at
http://leapcomputingforums.com/index.php. And of course we invite your
continued engagement on all of our social media channels mentioned
above.
In sincere gratitude,
The Leap Computing Team
