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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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.