Microsoft’s Marc Whitten just lifted the hood on the Xbox One’s technical specifications. In short: 8GB of RAM, USB 3.0, Wi-Fi Direct, a Blu-ray disc drive, 64-bit architecture and “practically silent operation”.
Kinect 2.0 also gets a substantial upgrade. Whitten promised the integrated camera will have a wider field of view, and the sensor will be able to detect more joints, to include rotation of wrists and shoulders. “When you are exercising it can read your heartbeat.”
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17 responses to “Under The Hood Of The Xbox One”
old tech already. no wireless AC just n, only 8gb of ram which is probably shared between the gfx chip. meh. wont even go into the fact all the tv functionality probably wont be compatible with aussie free to air and foxtel
Wireless ac? Are you kidding? On a console? You can barely get it on a pc.
Wireless AC adapter costs about AUD $200.00, I’m glad it’s not there. These features can be included later.
currently xbox360 has 512mb ram, its a big upgrade
Does seem to have an Ethernet port, which of course is superior to any type of wireless.
8gb’s shared even is aplenty, for a gaming rig. I don’t think you grasp the concept of memory much, it doesn’t necessarily mean the more you have the better the game will run.
What are the dimensions of the thing?
The screenshots released make it look gigantic
The kinect also looks massive, my TV is less than an inch thick, no way that is sitting on top
Sounds like they went with 8GB DDR3 unified. Must have been easy to implement the windows 8 kernel on it.
I’m glad they went with BluRay.
Whrere are the details about the GPU.
It’s probably 1.25TF R1100? Is that why they didn’t discuss it in detail?
No official details on the GPU, it would seem, though Joystiq are reporting that there’s also 32 MB of eDRAM with the GPU, which is interesting, given that Wired are reporting that the CPU, GPU and RAM are all on one SoC. I guess eDRAM turned out cheaper for them than DDR5?
Strange that the SoC will be fabbed on 40nm, given that Jaguar will be on 28nm and GCN is already on 28nm.
Strange indeed, and costly to fab these days. I think they are rushing it. They used the onchip cache technique to keep up with demanding games the last time too.
The 40nm report would seem to be incorrect, everyone is reporting it as 28nm now, which makes much more sense.
Anandtech has a good analysis of the memory issue here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6972/xbox-one-hardware-compared-to-playstation-4/3
Thank You. makes a lot of sense now.
basically MS saved a substantial amount of money on the hardware as well.
According to the article,
“Even if Microsoft can’t deliver the same effective memory bandwidth as Sony, it also has fewer GPU execution resources – it’s entirely possible that the Xbox One’s memory bandwidth demands will be inherently lower to begin with.”
I know for a fact that APU performance increases radically with memory bandwidth increase, unlike their CPU+GPU counterparts.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/memory-bandwidth-scaling-trinity,3419.html
Having the APU entirely communicate through SRAM can be a problem when you are doing parallel comupte on the GPU, simultaneous to graphics commands. Cache will have to be flushed and would cost cycles.
From what I can see the advantages of the two approaches are,
32SRAM method is easier to manufacture , slightly less expense.
GDDR5 method is costly, less cache flushing [less frame stutter], easier to program for, higher consistant performance.
In other words, MS seems to have cut corners every step of the way.
They should have used the money they spent on Steve Spielberg for the console harware.
Is the HDD upgradeable?
500GB isn’t that much these days especially for something that is a media entertainment box not just a gaming console.
They will have Xbox One 1Tb edition out 6 months after release
I’d be more keen on putting in an SSD (but I won’t be buying this console)
is the hdd ssd? or some fast 3.5″? or a slower 2.5″? hybrid?