The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 22, 2013 8:00 AM EST
It’s that time of decade again. Time for a new Xbox. It took four years for Microsoft to go from the original Xbox to the Xbox 360. The transition from Xbox 360 to the newly announced Xbox One will take right around 8 years, and the 360 won’t be going away anytime soon either. The console business demands long upgrade cycles in order to make early investments in hardware (often sold at a loss) worthwhile. This last round was much longer that it ever should have been, so the Xbox One arrives to a very welcoming crowd.
Yesterday Microsoft finally took the covers off the new Xbox, what it hopes will last for many years to come. At a high level here’s what we’re dealing with:
- 8-core AMD Jaguar CPU
- 12 CU/768 SP AMD GCN GPU
- 8GB DDR3 system memory
- 500GB HDD
- Blu-ray drive
- 2.4/5.0GHz 802.11 a/b/g/n, multiple radios with WiFi Direct support
- 4K HDMI in/out (for cable TV passthrough)
- USB 3.0
- Available later this year
While Microsoft was light on technical details, I believe we have enough to put together some decent analysis. Let’s get to it.
Chassis
The Xbox 360 was crafted during a time that seems so long ago. Consumer electronics styled in white were all the rage, we would be a few years away from the aluminum revolution that engulfs us today. Looking at the Xbox One tells us a lot about how things have changed.
Microsoft isn’t so obsessed with size here, at least initially. Wired reports that the Xbox One is larger than the outgoing 360, although it’s not clear whether we’re talking about the new slim or the original design. Either way, given what’s under the hood - skimping on cooling and ventilation isn’t a good thing.
The squared off design and glossy black chassis scream entertainment center. Microsoft isn’t playing for a position in your games cabinet, the Xbox One is just as much about consuming media as it is about playing games.
In its presentation Microsoft kept referencing how the world has changed. Smartphones, tablets, even internet connectivity are very different today than they were when the Xbox 360 launched in 2005. It’s what Microsoft didn’t mention that really seems to have played a role in its decision making behind the One: many critics didn’t see hope for another generation of high-end game consoles.
With so much of today focused on mobile, free to play and casual gaming on smartphones and tablets - would anyone even buy a next-generation console? For much of the past couple of years I’ve been going around meetings saying that before consolidation comes great expansion. I’ve been saying this about a number of markets, but I believe the phrase is very applicable to gaming. Casual gaming, the advent of free to play and even the current mobile revolution won’t do anything to the demand for high-end consoles today or in the near term - they simply expand the market for gamers. Eventually those types of games and gaming platforms will grow to the point where they start competing with one another and then the big console players might have an issue to worry about, but I suspect that’s still some time away. The depth offered by big gaming titles remains unmatched elsewhere. You can argue that many games are priced too high, but the Halo, BioShock, Mass Effect, CoD experience still drives a considerable portion of the market.
The fact that this debate is happening however has to have impacted Microsoft. Simply building a better Xbox 360 wasn’t going to guarantee success, and I suspect there were not insignificant numbers within the company who felt that even making the Xbox One as much of a gaming machine as it is would be a mistake. What resulted was a subtle pivot in strategy.
The Battle for the TV
Last year you couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a rumor of Apple getting into the TV business. As of yet those rumors haven’t gone anywhere other than to point to continued investment in the Apple TV. Go back even further and Google had its own TV aspirations, although met with far less success. More recently, Intel threw its hat into the ring. I don’t know for sure how things have changed with the new CEO, but as far as I can tell he’s a rational man and things should proceed with Intel Media’s plans for an IPTV service. All of this is a round about way of saying that TV is clearly important and viewed by many as one of the next ecosystem battles in tech.
Combine the fact that TV is important, with the fact that the Xbox 360 has evolved into a Netflix box for many, add a dash of uncertainty for the future of high end gaming consoles and you end up with the formula behind the Xbox One. If the future doesn’t look bright for high-end gaming consoles, turning the Xbox into something much more than that will hopefully guarantee its presence in the living room. At least that’s what I suspect Microsoft’s thinking was going into the Xbox One. With that in mind, everything about the One makes a lot of sense.
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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?