The Xbox One - Mini Review & Comparison to Xbox 360/PS4
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 20, 2013 8:00 AM ESTPower Consumption
As always I ran the Xbox One through a series of power consumption tests. I’ve described the tests below:
Off - Console is completely off, standby mode is disabled
Standby - Console is asleep, can be woken up by voice commands (if supported). Background updating is allowed in this mode.
Idle - Ethernet connected, no disc in drive, system idling at dashboard.
Load (BF4) - Ethernet connected, Battlefield 4 disc in drive, running Battlefield 4, stationary in test scene.
Load (BD Playback) - Ethernet connected, Blu-ray disc in drive, average power across Inception test scene.
CPU Load - SunSpider - Ethernet connected, no disc in drive, running SunSpider 1.0.2 in web browser.
CPU Load - Kraken - Ethernet connected, no disc in drive, running Kraken 1.1 in web browser
| Power Consumption Comparison | |||||||
| Total System Power | Off | Standby | Idle | Load (BF4) | Load (BD Playback) | ||
| Microsoft Xbox 360 Slim | 0.6W | - | 70.4W | 90.4W (RDR) | - | ||
| Microsoft Xbox One | 0.22W | 15.3W | 69.7W | 119.0W | 79.9W | ||
| Sony PlayStation 4 | 0.45W | 8.59W | 88.9W | 139.8W | 98.0W | ||
When I first saw the PS4’s idle numbers I was shocked. 80 watts is what our IVB-E GPU testbed idles at, and that’s with a massive 6-core CPU and a Titan GPU. Similarly, my Haswell + Titan CPU testbed has a lower idle power than that. The Xbox One’s numbers are a little better at 69W, but still 50 - 80% higher than I was otherwise expecting.
Standby power is also surprisingly high for the Xbox One. Granted in this mode you can turn on the entire console by saying Xbox On, but always-on voice recognition is also something Motorola deployed on the Moto X and did so in a far lower power budget.
The only good news on the power front is really what happens when the console is completely off. I’m happy to report that I measured between 0.22 and 0.45W of draw while off, far less than previous Xbox 360s.
Power under load is pretty much as expected. In general the Xbox One appears to draw ~120W under max load, which isn’t much at all. I’m actually surprised by the delta between idle power and loaded GPU power (~50W). In this case I’m wondering if Microsoft is doing much power gating of unused CPU cores and/or GPU resources. The same is true for Sony on the PS4. It’s entirely possible that AMD hasn’t offered the same hooks into power management that you’d see on a PC equipped with an APU.
Blu-ray playback power consumption is more reasonable on the Xbox One than on the PS4. In both cases though the numbers are much higher than I’d like them to be.
I threw in some browser based CPU benchmarks and power numbers as well. Both the Xbox One and PS4 ship with integrated web browsers. Neither experience is particularly well optimized for performance, but the PS4 definitely has the edge at least in javascript performance.
| Power Consumption Comparison | ||||||
| Lower is Better | SunSpider 1.0.2 (Performance) | SunSpider 1.0.2 (Power) | Kraken 1.1 (Performance) | Kraken 1.1 (Power) | ||
| Microsoft Xbox One | 2360.9 ms | 72.4W | 111892.5 ms | 72.9W | ||
| Sony PlayStation 4 | 1027.4 ms | 114.7W | 22768.7 ms | 114.5W | ||
Power consumption while running these CPU workloads is interesting. The marginal increase in system power consumption while running both tests on the Xbox One indicates one of two things: we’re either only taxing 1 - 2 cores here and/or Microsoft isn’t power gating unused CPU cores. I suspect it’s the former, since IE on the Xbox technically falls under the Windows kernel’s jurisdiction and I don’t believe it has more than 1 - 2 cores allocated for its needs.
The PS4 on the other hand shows a far bigger increase in power consumption during these workloads. For one we’re talking about higher levels of performance, but it’s also possible that Sony is allowing apps access to more CPU cores.
There’s definitely room for improvement in driving down power consumption on both next-generation platforms. I don’t know that there’s huge motivation to do so outside of me complaining about it though. I would like to see idle power drop below 50W, standby power shouldn’t be anywhere near this high on either platform, and the same goes for power consumption while playing back a Blu-ray movie.
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airmantharp - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
Having actual CPU resources, a unified GPU architecture with desktops (and many mobile SoCs), and tons of RAM are all big differences over the last generation's introduction.The Xbox expounds on that by adding in co-processors that allow for lots of difficult stuff to happen in real-time without affecting overall performance.
mikeisfly - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
Thank god people didn't think like this when computers first started with switches and paper tape. Remember we have to start some where to move the technology forward. I want the Jarvis computer in Iron Man! You don't get there by making a console that can play games. You get there by making a console that can play games and has voice recognition and gestures and ......People get use to interacting with new input sources and then you find your self in a situation when you say how did I ever live without this. You guys sound like I did in the 80s when Microsoft was coming out with this stupid gui crap. "You will have to rip the command line from my cold dead fingers!" Where would we be today if everyone thought like me. Where would the Internet be if it was just command line. I for one applaud Microsoft for trying to expand the gaming market not just for hard core gamers but people like my girl too. I know the PS4 might have more power in terms of compute performance but that is not what games are about, it's about story line, immersiveness (made-up word), and to some extent graphics. Truth is there is really no difference between 1080 and 720 on a Big Screen, remember people this is not a PC monitor. And the X1 can do 1080p. I'm looking forward to what both systems can offer in this next generation but I'm more interested in the X1 due to it's forward thinking aspects. Only time will tell though.
douglord - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
Rule of thumb is you need a 10x increase in power to get a 100% increase in visual fidelity. Look at 360 vs One. 6x the power and maybe games look 50% better. So we are talking about the PS4 looking 5% better than Xbox One. In this gen, it really is about who has the exclusives you want.And if you are looking out 5+ years you have to take into account Xbox's cloud initiative. Have you used OnLive? II can play Borderlands 2 on an Intel Atom. If MS puts the $ behind it, those 8 cores and pitiful CPU could be used just to power the OS and cloud terminal. Only way these consoles can keep up with midrange PCs.
Revdarian - Sunday, November 24, 2013 - link
Interesting that you use numbers referring to visual fidelity, when it is a non quantifiable, perceptual, quality.Also there is no such Rule of Thumb regarding it, but what is known is that in certain games like CoD:Ghosts due to certain choices the xb1 is able to pump less than half the pixels that the ps4 can.
If you believe in the Cloud for that kind of gaming, Sony has bought Gaikai and it is a project that started sooner than the MS counterpart, heck the MS counterpart hasn't been named.
RubyX - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
How do the noise levels of the consoles compare?According to other reviews they both seem to be fairly quiet, which is great, but is there a noticable difference between them?
szimm - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
I'm wondering the same - I've seen lots of people point out the fact that the Xbox One is designed to be bigger, but more cool and quiet. However, I haven't seen any confirmation that it is in fact more quiet than the PS4.bill5 - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
15w standby, seems a bit high.Lets say you leave it on standby 24/7, as you would, that's 360 watts a day, almost 11 KWh/s month. I pay ~10cent poer Kwh in general, so 1.10/month.
Could add up to $60+ over 5 years. More if the EPA enforces more regulations rising the cost of electricity as they typically are doing.
ydeer - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
Yes, the standby power of the XBone and PS4 bothers me too. I often leave my TV and Consoles untouched for weeks, so the only sensible thing is to put them on a Master/Slave powerstrip which cuts them off the grid when the TV isn’t on.Of course that defeats the entire standby background downloads, but in the case of Sony, I have to wonder why they put a whole proprietary ARM SoC* (with 2GB of DDR3 RAM) on the board for "low power standby and background downloads" and then end up with unbelievable 70W figures.
This is essentially a mobile phone without a display, I don’t think it should use more than 3 Watt idle with the HD spun down.
My only explanation is that they couldn’t get the ARM software/OS side if things wrapped up in time for the launch, so for now they use the x86 CPU for background downloads even though it was never intended to do that.
* http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/PlayStation+4+Teard...
ydeer - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
Correction, the SoC only has access to 2Gb (= 256 MB) of DDR3 RAM.However, I found a document that seems to confirm that the ARM Subsystem did not work as planned and Sony currently uses the APU for all standby/background tasks.
Maybe somebody who is fluent in Japanese could give us a short abstract of the part that talks about the subsystem.
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A//p...
tipoo - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
Hey Anand, did you see the Wii U GPU die shots? How many shaders do you think are in there? I think it's almost certainly 160 at this point, but there are a few holdouts saying 320 which seems impossible with the shader config/size. They are basing that off the clusters being a bit bigger than normal shader cores, but that could be down to process optimization.