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Xbox One hardware

In a motility that conspicuously signals Microsoft's agony to get alee of Sony'southward PlayStation four past any ways possible, the Xbox Ane's CPU has been speed boosted from 1.6GHz to 1.75GHz — 150MHz, or just under 10%. At the same press conference, Microsoft also said that the Xbox I has entered mass production, and that it'southward on schedule for a November release — though we nevertheless don't accept an exact release date. (Updated: November 22 now seems likely.) If you're a core gamer — the demographic that console makers primarily target — the speed bump sounds like you lot're getting some extra functioning for free. In reality, this is just marketing swill; the PS4, by virtue of its much beefier GPU, will even so be much more powerful than the Xbox Ane — on newspaper, anyway.

Inside both the PS4 and Xbox I is an AMD Jaguar-based CPU and a Southern Islands-based GPU. Originally, the Xbox One CPU was clocked at one.6GHz, while the GPU was clocked at 800MHz. Final month the GPU was bumped to 853MHz (an increment of around 7%), and now the CPU has boosted to 1.75GHz. This might sound like you're getting an extra 5-x% functioning for gratuitous, but information technology's important to remember that Microsoft isn't magically pushing the envelope on these cores: AMD regularly ships Jaguar-based parts at 2GHz, and the Radeon 7790 (which is most similar to the Xbox I's GPU) ships with a core clock of 1000MHz. The fact of the matter is that the Xbox One's cores are underclocked, probably to reduce ability consumption, and thus heat and noise generation. Microsoft could happily bump both cores up another x% and still exist within the operational envelope — the console would just exist a scrap noisier.

Xbox One SoCWhile a costless speed heave is of grade nice, this isn't going to make up the massive functioning lead granted by the PS4'due south GPU, which has l% more compute units (cores), and thus 50% college theoretical peak performance. It is worth noting that nosotros still don't know the clock speed of either the CPU or GPU in the PS4, though. So far we accept assumed that they will be comparable to the Xbox 1 — but if they're 10 or twenty% lower, and then the performance gap between the two consoles will be adequately small. Ultimately, as we've already reported numerous times, the real-world departure between the consoles is probable to be very, very pocket-sized, except mayhap in console exclusives where developers program the games to make practiced use of console-specific architectural differences.

In other news, Microsoft says the Xbox 1 has entered mass production, for release in November. Nosotros don't take an verbal release date, and eight unlucky countries will even so have to look for a 2014 release. Presumably Microsoft will endeavor to beat the PS4 (which releases on November 15 in the The states and Nov 29 in Europe), but hasn't been able to fix a specific date thanks to all of the very late changes to the panel.

Now read: Analyzing the Xbox One's graphics capabilities, odd SoC architecture, and bus bandwidth