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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novastar78 - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
I'm curious to see what feature sets each of these GPU's has. These are not the run of the mill APU's that you can buy at the store. These are both custom SoC's and it's my understanding that they may even be from different generations (7000 vs. 8000), similar to how the PS3's RSX was from the 7900 era and the Xenos was around the R600 era (Unified Architecture). Although this would be a much smaller difference here being the same make (AMD) and similar model (GCN).In the end simply measuring CU's may not be enough to determine the true power/quality of the two GPU's.
We may never know as I highly doubt they will easily divulge this info for fear of the outcry (especially from M$ standpoint).
Still i'm very curious...
epobirs - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
"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."I would disagree. You won't see compatibility with existing Xbox discs but I very much expect a line of original Xbox titles to be offered as download purchases on the new machine. If Nintendo thinks $5 for an NES game running ont he Wii U is reasonable, Microsoft should able to make some good coin on a core set of two or three dozen Xbox titles at $10 each.
As for the 360 library, those should start turning up in HD (well, HD-ier) remakes in about four years as the market ripens for bringing those item back into circulation. This has worked very well for adding value to the PS3 with HD remake collections of PS2 hits. Given the right tools, reworking old IP can be very cost effective.
Some of the best original Xbox titles might get native remakes. We've already had Halo Anniversary and I wouldn't be surprised to see a Halo 2 Anniversary turn up for Xbox One. Jade Empire and the Knights of the Old Republic games may be worth the investment.
RedavutstuvadeR - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Anand Lal Shimpi why did you not mention any thing about the four move engines in the Xbox one and the capabilities of the cloud quadrupling the Xbox ones powerRedavutstuvadeR - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
a link to cloud power of XB1news.softpedia.com/news/Xbox-One-Cloud-Makes-the-Console-Four-Times-More-Powerful-355818.shtml
tipoo - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
iirc the PS4 had similar hardware blocks to the Move engines, just no fancy branding? And the cloud compute thing is a future theoretical, I'll factor it in when it's actually shown to work well. It can't be used for any latency sensitive calculations of course.slickr - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
http://i.imgur.com/5WXh32l.jpgjmr99 - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
The Xbox 1 (aka PS4 Mini aka PS4 Lite) sure is a colossal disappointment. Microsoft are trying to cut costs and save money in order to create the biggest gap they can btwn selling price and production cost. In other words, the Apple approach: rape your customers. Kudos to Sony for 1152 cores and gddr5.croc123 - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - link
Interesting article in my 'local' rag this AM...http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/games/how-micro...
JimF2 - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
I won't buy any console that needs an internet connection. It is a huge privacy risk to have a console with a camera that connects to the internet. A console that connects to the internet once per day or once per week has the same privacy risk as a console with an always-on connection.Gamers should boycott Xbox One so the console manufacturers get the message that we won't accept a required internet connection. If a physical disk is inserted in the console, no internet connection should be needed to prevent piracy. The console manufacturers just have to develop a proprietary disk format that can't be copied by Windows, Mac or Linux. It would be fine if gamers who don't want to put a physical disk in the console to prove they own the game are required to have an internet connection. That way, if a gamer wants to prevent game companies from spying on them, they would just swap disks when switching games. If a gamer uses LIVE or they want the convenience of not needing to swap disks, they would provide an internet connection.
TheEvilBlight - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
The PS4's PS3 games are allegedly coming via GaiKai. I'm curious what MS will do for the old stable of games. I wonder if it would be too much to implement other VM's for the Xbox and the Xbox 360; though a VM on an x86 running PPC is likely to suffer severe penalties. It's either state or gaming from the cloud.Alternatively, developers will recompile some of the "best hits" on the 360 and re-release for the Xbox One. I wonder how that would work with the Halo series, but having Gears of War on a faster machine might be fun.