AnandTech has performed an in-depth analysis on the Xbox One's known hardware, discovering that - on paper at least - Microsoft's next-generation console is less powerful than Sony's PlayStation 4. While a number of hardware elements are very similar between the two systems, including the AMD Jaguar-based processors that each contain eight cores at (probably) 1.6 GHz, their GPUs differ.
This is the motherboard of the Xbox One
Both systems use very similar AMD GCN-based GPUs, although Sony have beefed up their GPU while Microsoft have kept theirs relatively modest. The PlayStation 4 GPU features 1152 shader processors/GPU cores for 1.84 TFLOPS of compute power, while the Xbox One GPU features only 768 GPU cores for 1.23 TFLOPS of compute power. The result is that the PlayStation 4 has 50% greater raw shader performance than the Xbox One.
Also, while both systems implement 8 GB of RAM, Microsoft's approach differs from Sony's: the Xbox One features DDR3 RAM at 2133 MHz for 68.3 GB/s of bandwidth, while the PlayStation 4 uses GDDR5 RAM at 5500 MHz for 170.6 GB/s of bandwidth. That said, Microsoft packs an extra 32 MB of eSRAM for 102 GB/s of embedded memory bandwidth, and although this doesn't sound like a big deal, as AnandTech points out it can greatly help while buffering frames.
The benefits for Microsoft cutting back on system memory specifications is that it both costs less to produce and consumes less power, although AnandTech has concerns that the performance gap between the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One will become more apparent with time. The full analysis is definitely worth a read if you're interested in the technical side of these consoles, so hit up the source link for more details.
Source: AnandTech | Image via Wired
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