The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 22, 2013 8:00 AM ESTPower & Thermals
Microsoft made a point to focus on the Xbox One’s new power states during its introduction. Remember that when the Xbox 360 was introduced, power gating wasn’t present in any shipping CPU or GPU architectures. The Xbox One (and likely the PlayStation 4) can power gate unused CPU cores. AMD’s GCN architecture supports power gating, so I’d assume that parts of the GPU can be power gated as well. Dynamic frequency/voltage scaling is also supported. The result is that we should see a good dynamic range of power consumption on the Xbox One, compared to the Xbox 360’s more on/off nature.
AMD’s Jaguar is quite power efficient, capable of low single digit idle power so I would expect far lower idle power consumption than even the current slim Xbox 360 (50W would be easy, 20W should be doable for truly idle). Under heavy gaming load I’d expect to see higher power consumption than the current Xbox 360, but still less than the original 2005 Xbox 360.
Compared to the PlayStation 4, Microsoft should have the cooler running console under load. Fewer GPU ALUs and lower power memory don’t help with performance but do at least offer one side benefit.
OS
The Xbox One is powered by two independent OSes running on a custom version of Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor. Microsoft made the hypervisor very lightweight, and created hard partitions of system resources for the two OSes that run on top of it: the Xbox OS and the Windows kernel.
The Xbox OS is used to play games, while the Windows kernel effectively handles all apps (as well as things like some of the processing for Kinect inputs). Since both OSes are just VMs on the same hypervisor, they are both running simultaneously all of the time, enabling seamless switching between the two. With much faster hardware and more cores (8 vs 3 in the Xbox 360), Microsoft can likely dedicate Xbox 360-like CPU performance to the Windows kernel while running games without any negative performance impact. Transitioning in/out of a game should be very quick thanks to this architecture. It makes a ton of sense.
Similarly, you can now multitask with apps. Microsoft enabled Windows 8-like multitasking where you can snap an app to one side of the screen while watching a video or playing a game on the other.
The hard partitioning of resources would be nice to know more about. The easiest thing would be to dedicate a Jaguar compute module to each OS, but that might end up being overkill for the Windows kernel and insufficient for some gaming workloads. I suspect ~1GB of system memory ends up being carved off for Windows.
Kinect & New Controller
All Xbox One consoles will ship with a bundled Kinect sensor. Game console accessories generally don’t do all that well if they’re optional. Kinect seemed to be the exception to the rule, but Microsoft is very focused on Kinect being a part of the Xbox going forward so integration here makes sense.
The One’s introduction was done entirely via Kinect enabled voice and gesture controls. You can even wake the Xbox One from a sleep state using voice (say “Xbox on”), leveraging Kinect and good power gating at the silicon level. You can use large two-hand pinch and stretch gestures to quickly move in and out of the One’s home screen.
The Kinect sensor itself is one of 5 semi-custom silicon elements in the Xbox One - the other four are: SoC, PCH, Kinect IO chip and Blu-ray DSP (read: the end of optical drive based exploits). In the One’s Kinect implementation Microsoft goes from a 640 x 480 sensor to 1920 x 1080 (I’m assuming 1080p for the depth stream as well). The camera’s field of view was increased by 60%, allowing support for up to 6 recognized skeletons (compared to 2 in the original Kinect). Taller users can now get closer to the camera thanks to the larger FOV, similarly the sensor can be used in smaller rooms.
The Xbox One will also ship with a new redesigned wireless controller with vibrating triggers:
Thanks to Kinect's higher resolution and more sensitive camera, the console should be able to identify who is gaming and automatically pair the user to the controller.
TV
The Xbox One features a HDMI input for cable TV passthrough (from a cable box or some other tuner with HDMI out). Content passed through can be viewed with overlays from the Xbox or just as you would if the Xbox wasn’t present. Microsoft built its own electronic program guide that allows you to tune channels by name, not just channel number (e.g. say “Watch HBO”). The implementation looks pretty slick, and should hopefully keep you from having to switch inputs on your TV - the Xbox One should drive everything. Microsoft appears to be doing its best to merge legacy TV with the new world of buying/renting content via Xbox Live. It’s a smart move.
One area where Microsoft is being a bit more aggressive is in its work with the NFL. Microsoft demonstrated fantasy football integration while watching NFL passed through to the Xbox One.
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BSMonitor - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
Nexus tablet doesn't have CoD for free..elitewolverine - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
no one will make a $1 game with the visuals of CoD, BF2, halo, the list goes on. They would make 0 money.google taking hdtv gaming seriously? They make all their money on ad's, you honestly think people constantly want ads in a video game? And not product placement...ads. Before you matchmake just watching this 30sec video about vagisil...yea right...
Also, what is a few generations? A few is more than 2, 3 generations ago we were at the ps1. 14yrs ago.
Your telling me that its going to take 19yrs for a tablet to have todays graphics of the xbox1? By that time what the hell will the ps5 have or the x5....
The biggest thing the x1 has for it, that every one is forgetting...cloud/azure.
This is huge, so huge time will show just how little the x1 in multiplayer games will need to compute tasks
Majeed Belle - Sunday, September 8, 2013 - link
I think you are putting way too much stake in the cloud especially when we are talking about computing anything graphics or otherwise. People can barely download music on a steady connection right now. Consoles can't even get you solid updates in a timely manner and you are talking about offloading real work over the internet?ok.
Mathos - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
After reading a lot of articles about these two consoles, and their SoC's. There are some things we can extrapolate from this info.Both Systems are based on the same 8core x86 amd64 CPU. Which means the main logic and memory controllers in the APU's are the the exact same. The comment about PS4 being married to ddr5 may not be true, as we all know that the GPU's can also run on ddr3, plus it may be possible that the cpu memory controller is also capable of running ddr5 or ddr3 in either system..
Both systems are using a 256bit memory bus. Being these are x86 amd cpus, that likely points to jaguar using a quad channel memory controller 64+64+64+64=256, which could be good news when they hit the desktop, if they retain said quad channel controller. It would also be nice to see that in AMD's mainstream chips as well.
tipoo - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
GDDR5 is on the PS4 official spec sheet.Kevin G - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
Going with eSRAM is an odd choice. I would have through capacity would have been more important than absolute latency. By merit of being on-die, using eDRAM would have lower latency than external DDR3. If they had chosen eDRAM, they could have had 128 MB on die. That is enough for three 32 bit, 4K resolution buffers. In such a case, I'd have that 128 MB of eDRAM directly accessible and not a cache. Sure, software would need to be aware of the two different memory pools for optimizations but most of that would be handled by API calls (ie a DirectX function calls would set up a frame buffer in the eDRAM for the programmer).The bandwidth figures for the eSRAM seem to be a bit on the low side too. The Xbox 360 had 256 GB/s of bandwidth between the ROPs and eDRAM. With high clock speeds and a wider bus, I would have thought the Xbox One had ~820 GB/s bandwidth there.
I'm also puzzled by MS using DDR3 for main memory. While lower power than GDDR5, for a console plugged into a wall, the bandwidth benefits would out weigh the power savings in my judgement. There is also another option: DDR4. Going for a 3.2 Ghz effective clock on DDR4 should be feasible as long as MS could get a manufacture to start producing those chips this year. (DDR4 is ready for manufacture now but they're holding off volume production until a CPU with an on-die DDR4 memory controller becomes available.) With 3.2 Ghz DDR4, bandwidth would move to 102.4 GB/s. Still less than what the PS4 has but not drastically so. At the end of the Xbox One's life span, I'd see DDR4 being cheaper than acquiring DDR3.
As far as the XBox One's AV capabilities, I'd personally have released two consoles. One with the basic HDMI switching and another with Cable card + tuner + DVR. And for good measure, the model with Cable card + tuner + DVR would also have an Xbox 360 SoC to provide backwards compatibility and run the DVR software while the x86 CPU's handle gaming and the basic apps. If MS is going to go in this direction, might as well go all the way.
Good to see 802.11n and dual band support. With HDMI in and out, I'd have also included HDMI+Ethernet support there as well. Basically the Xbox One would have a nice embedded router between the Gigabit Ethernet port, the two HDMI ports and the 802.11n wireless.
jabber - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
Remember though that the DDR3 in the Xbox will be hardwired directly with no legacy or other PC related stuff getting in the way. This will be optimised DDR3 and not working exactly how its standardised in our PCs.Kevin G - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
The only advantage DDR3 in the Xbox One has over a PC is that it is soldered. This allows for marginally better signaling without the edge connector of a DIMM.kamil - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
That was surprisingly fair, considering a lot of what I've seen since yesterday. Sony tried hard to do what it thought would "improve the gaming experience" and ended up with a lot of social integration and considerably more aggressive hardware. Microsoft didn't really add much to actually playing games (though they do have some cloud-based stuff including game streaming) but has made a play for becoming a full living room experience, with games, live and recorded television, no hassle cable integration, and seemingly several exclusive partnerships. I'm not convinced that core gamers will see much use for those options (though most of the people I know in that group were already PC-focused if not exclusive) or the social things with the PS4, but the raw power would be a nice draw, assuming Sony doesn't accidentally pull a 360 and overheat with any noteworthy extended use.Of course, if the rumors of Microsoft pushing developers toward always-online DRM, included on-console mandatory check-in every 24 hours, fees for pre-owned or shared games, forced hard drive installs, etc. all pan out a lot of people are going to boycott on principle even if they don't buy used games and have great internet.
blacks329 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I fall in that category of, not buying used games with decent internet (but capped - damn you Canadian duopoly!!) but definitely won't be picking up the X1 if this holds (at least early on).Additionally, I hate paying for XBL and have no intention of doing it going forward, hopefully Sony doesn't follow this route and maintains PS+ as value added and not a requirement for playing games online.