The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 22, 2013 8:00 AM ESTCPU & GPU Hardware Analyzed
Although Microsoft did its best to minimize AMD’s role in all of this, the Xbox One features a semi-custom 28nm APU designed with AMD. If this sounds familiar it’s because the strategy is very similar to what Sony employed for the PS4’s silicon.
The phrase semi-custom comes from the fact that AMD is leveraging much of its already developed IP for the SoC. On the CPU front we have two Jaguar compute units, each one with four independent processor cores and a shared 2MB L2 cache. The combination of the two give the Xbox One its 8-core CPU. This is the same basic layout of the PS4‘s SoC.
If you’re not familiar with it, Jaguar is the follow-on to AMD’s Bobcat core - think of it as AMD’s answer to the Intel Atom. Jaguar is a 2-issue OoO architecture, but with roughly 20% higher IPC than Bobcat thanks to a number of tweaks. In ARM terms we’re talking about something that’s faster than a Cortex A15. I expect Jaguar to be close but likely fall behind Intel’s Silvermont, at least at the highest shipping frequencies. Jaguar is the foundation of AMD’s Kabini and Temash APUs, where it will ship first. I’ll have a deeper architectural look at Jaguar later this week. Update: It's live!
Inside the Xbox One, courtesy Wired
There’s no word on clock speed, but Jaguar at 28nm is good for up to 2GHz depending on thermal headroom. Current rumors point to both the PS4 and Xbox One running their Jaguar cores at 1.6GHz, which sounds about right. In terms of TDP, on the CPU side you’re likely looking at 30W with all cores fully loaded.
The move away from PowerPC to 64-bit x86 cores means the One breaks backwards compatibility with all Xbox 360 titles. Microsoft won’t be pursuing any sort of a backwards compatibility strategy, although if a game developer wanted to it could port an older title to the new console. Interestingly enough, the first Xbox was also an x86 design - from a hardware/ISA standpoint the new Xbox One is backwards compatible with its grandfather, although Microsoft would have to enable that as a feature in software - something that’s quite unlikely.
| Microsoft Xbox One vs. Sony PlayStation 4 Spec comparison | ||||||||||||||
| Xbox 360 | Xbox One | PlayStation 4 | ||||||||||||
| CPU Cores/Threads | 3/6 | 8/8 | 8/8 | |||||||||||
| CPU Frequency | 3.2GHz | 1.6GHz (est) | 1.6GHz (est) | |||||||||||
| CPU µArch | IBM PowerPC | AMD Jaguar | AMD Jaguar | |||||||||||
| Shared L2 Cache | 1MB | 2 x 2MB | 2 x 2MB | |||||||||||
| GPU Cores | 768 | 1152 | ||||||||||||
| Peak Shader Throughput | 0.24 TFLOPS | 1.23 TFLOPS | 1.84 TFLOPS | |||||||||||
| Embedded Memory | 10MB eDRAM | 32MB eSRAM | - | |||||||||||
| Embedded Memory Bandwidth | 32GB/s | 102GB/s | - | |||||||||||
| System Memory | 512MB 1400MHz GDDR3 | 8GB 2133MHz DDR3 | 8GB 5500MHz GDDR5 | |||||||||||
| System Memory Bus | 128-bits | 256-bits | 256-bits | |||||||||||
| System Memory Bandwidth | 22.4 GB/s | 68.3 GB/s | 176.0 GB/s | |||||||||||
| Manufacturing Process | 28nm | 28nm | ||||||||||||
On the graphics side it’s once again obvious that Microsoft and Sony are shopping at the same store as the Xbox One’s SoC integrates an AMD GCN based GPU. Here’s where things start to get a bit controversial. Sony opted for an 18 Compute Unit GCN configuration, totaling 1152 shader processors/cores/ALUs. Microsoft went for a far smaller configuration: 768 (12 CUs).
Microsoft can’t make up the difference in clock speed alone (AMD’s GCN seems to top out around 1GHz on 28nm), and based on current leaks it looks like both MS and Sony are running their GPUs at the same 800MHz clock. The result is a 33% reduction in compute power, from 1.84 TFLOPs in the PS4 to 1.23 TFLOPs in the Xbox One. We’re still talking about over 5x the peak theoretical shader performance of the Xbox 360, likely even more given increases in efficiency thanks to AMD’s scalar GCN architecture (MS quotes up to 8x better GPU performance) - but there’s no escaping the fact that Microsoft has given the Xbox One less GPU hardware than Sony gave the PlayStation 4. Note that unlike the Xbox 360 vs. PS3 era, Sony's hardware advantage here won't need any clever developer work to extract - the architectures are near identical, Sony just has more resources available to use.
Remember all of my talk earlier about a slight pivot in strategy? Microsoft seems to believe that throwing as much power as possible at the next Xbox wasn’t the key to success and its silicon choices reflect that.
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jeffkibuule - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
Both were built to work along side each other. If it were the former, you'd expect to run Office on it (an HTPC is still a PC) and if it were the latter you'd need to quit a game before running any media apps (since the game would demand to use all system RAM available).As such, it really is neither of the scenarios you presented.
Littleluk - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
I think most of the hardware choices are designed with the display device in mind. There is a huge market of 1080p devices and the price point for those is well established. Most households now have one or will have one. Locking in hardware and performance at a set resolution is good for console costs and game developers. (it does worry me a bit whether advances in PC display technology will equate to higher graphics displays in PC games if the rest of the market is set at 1080p... why develop higher res models etc.) Sony going for a bit higher graphics performance could be an advantage someday if display technology changes to utilize the headroom but Microsoft has solid hardware for their target resolution.The hypervisor approach is particularly interesting to me as it might be a window into the future of where MS may take OS development. Virtual machines optimized for particular tasks can give you a faster spreadsheets and higher game fps on the same box by selecting which OS module is running. Is there a plan somewhere to put Office 365 on the Xbox One? Microsoft would like nothing better than to be selling software suites that use MS cloud services across multiple platforms to each and every one of us.
tipoo - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
More power can be advantageous to the same resolution...My Radeon x1650 could run games in 1920x1080, that doesn't mean it can do everything a GTX680 can at the same res.bengildenstein - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
A visual comparison between the games demonstrated in the PS4 and XB1 presentations clearly give the graphical edge to the PS4. PS4 games look distinctly next-gen, and are approaching CGI in fidelity. These are early days, and this comparison is hardly scientific, but it seems to corroborate the stronger, easier to develop for hardware in the PS4.But I think the underestimated feature for the PS4 is the 'share' button on the controller. Game spectating is a big deal, and this gives the PS4 a fan-based advertising engine. Due to the simplicity of sharing video, expect a flood of high-quality PS4 videos to be uploaded to the web, making the PS4 and PS4 games much more visible online. This turns regular players into advertisers for the system which should significantly help its popularity with cool 'look what I did' videos, walkthroughs, and competitions.
I am also very interested to see how Sony uses the second, low-power, always-on processor in the PS4. Certainly it would be possible to include voice-commands ala XB1, but I think that this can open up interesting new uses to keep the system competitive over the coming years.
Flunk - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
I think you're reading too much into presentations that could very well have been 100% pre-processed CGI. I expect that the final games will look quite similar on both.senecarr - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
You might want to check the Xbox One presentation - one the things they mention is that game play share is easy for developers to include because of all the connections to the Azure Cloud computing. So that just leaves a share button, but that is actually horrible compared to Kinect, which be on every Xbox One. Instead of hitting a button in the middle of your controller and losing your momentum in the game, for Xbox One you should just be able to yell, Xbox, start recording game play.BPB - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
I think the PS4 will share to more people. I expect the Xbox One sharing to be either Xbox Live only or the MS universe only. I think Sony's sharing won't be as limited. At least that is the impression I got from the presentations.blacks329 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
PS Eye (Sony's Kinect) will be included with every console as well, this was announced back in February.jabber - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
If these new boxes are more Media than gaming orientated going forward it could mean far shorter life-cycles for them. We could be going to a 3-4 year cycle rather than the current 8 year trend.HisDivineOrder - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
"The day Microsoft treats Xbox as a platform and not a console is the day that Apple and Google have a much more formidable competitor."I'd say the reverse. The day that Apple and Google decide to become competitors to Xbox is the day that Xbox (and Playstation) go extinct. Right now, MS and Sony are getting by because the HDTV efforts by Apple and Google are "experiments" and not taken seriously. Imagine an AppleTV where Apple allows app installations and a GoogleTV that's focused on gaming with decent hardware.
And imagine how low that GoogleTV (for Games) would cost. Imagine it opens up Android and just like that, bajillions of apps descend upon it.
Hell, it's debatable if they even need to bother making more than a streaming device to receive the image from your tablet and/or smartphone to do just that. Really, all Google needs is an AppleTV-like Airplay connection. You can already plug in whatever USB/bluetooth controller you like.
Within a few generations of Google taking HDTV gaming seriously, they could walk all over Sony and MS because while consoles sit and languish for longer and longer periods of time, tablets are constantly evolving year after year, iterating upward in specs at an impressive rate.
How long before even the Xbox One isn't pushing out graphics far enough ahead of a Nexus tablet that people just go with the $100-$200 tablet with the free to $1 games instead?