The Xbox One: Hardware Analysis & Comparison to PlayStation 4

[UnoriginalGuy]

My take away:

- PS4 and XBox One are going to be similar hardware wise, with the PS4 having an edge in raw power and the XBox One having an edge in "cleverness" (e.g. memory caching) and power consumption (lower).

- Microsoft is re-using Hyper-V in a very awesome way(!).

- HDMI passthrough is Microsoft's "ace in the hole."

- Developers are going to have a great time this generation thanks to how similar the hardware is (identical in many cases).

I really want to know how Microsoft is able to run two hypervisors and offer GPU acceleration to both concurrently. Is this part of AMD's new CPU+GPU on one die magic, or is this something we'll see on the PC?

[wmf]

Using cleverness to get better performance than your competitor is an edge; using cleverness to get the same performance in the common case but worse performance in the worst case is poor design.

I suspect that HDMI passthrough will be a frustratingly unfulfilled promise, as it is with Google TV.

Recent GPUs are virtualizeable (using multiple command queues); this is mostly targeted for VDI or cloud gaming but unused in PCs. http://www.nvidia.com/object/enterprise-virtualization.html

[Breakthrough]

I don't know if I would consider HDMI passthrough as an ace in the hole... I mean I get how it would be cool to be able to overlay your cable box output on the screen, but this also implies that you would have to have your Xbox on every time you wanted to watch television.

Unless, of course, the pass through works when the device is turned off... However, I haven't heard any mention yet that it does (does anyone know if it will support this?).

And plus, if you had any other multimedia devices (e.g. a Blu-ray player), wouldn't you still need to use the other inputs on the television anyways?

[slacka]

> "Developers are going to have a great time this generation thanks to how similar the hardware is (identical in many cases)."

Sure the hardware will be similar, but what use is that if the APIs to access the hardware are totally different? I think the odds of Sony using DirectX in their SDK are pretty slim.

[erickhill]

Took me a while to discover the meat of the article was hidden inside a drop-down navigation system. I honestly nearly bailed thinking, "This is all there is?"

What an awful idea. Thank goodness I saw it at the last minute.

[sootzoo]

Just view it in Print mode instead:

http://www.anandtech.com/print/6972/xbox-one-hardware-compar...

[salimmadjd]

>Took me a while to discover the meat of the article was hidden inside a drop-down navigation system

I agree! I hate their navigation UI. In general drop downs should only be used for familiar lists (counties, states, etc.) However, some of their articles are very detailed and has numerous pages and they need to provide a quick access to individual pages. One work around is to provide a simple "Next >>" at the bottom of the article. It would make it a lot less confusing.

[guiambros]

That's the experienced offered by most hardware review sites - AnandTech, DP Review, Toms Hardware, Extreme Overclocking, etc. Certainly to pump up pageviews, and thus generate more revenue.

Having said that, it is still bad design/usability. They could easily fix by keeping the model of separate pages for each topic, but moving the content from the drop down to an index at the bottom of each page, and also use prev/next buttons.

[rammark]

This is pretty much standard on hardware benchmarking and review sites. I'm not saying that it's a good design, but it's not unique to this site.

[ScottWhigham]

I actually prefer it greatly to either the never ending scroll or the digit-based pagination (1, 2, 3, Next, etc) wherein I cannot tell what's on page 3 or page 4. Often I just want to go to the summary, or to just view GPU info. I like it.

[snogglethorpe]

Note that a lot of the best info is actually in the user comments anyway. Some of the arguments there are very enlightening, and uncover good points that the article didn't touch (even if you look at all the pages, the article was pretty brief and short on analysis).

[djKianoosh]

It's really bad in mobile browsers.. a thin gray line, very easily missed

[kristofferR]

> "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."

Microsoft actually confirmed that 3GB will be reserved for the OS while only 5GB is available for games. Check out the video at 9:44

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/05/21/in...

[AdrianRossouw]

> Combine the fact that TV is important, with the fact that the Xbox 360 has evolved into a Netflix box for many,

i thought the ps3 was more widely used for streaming?

it's pretty fscking ridiculous that you need to have gold membership AND netflix membership to stream with the xbox.

[MacsHeadroom]

>i thought the ps3 was more widely used for streaming?

Not by a LONG shot.

And you don't need gold membership to use the Netflix app on xbox. Also, the Netflix app for xbox is much better than the PS3 app.

[rbanffy]

It looks like the Sony machine will be more expensive (or its profit margins will be a lot lower). The PS4 seems to have a lot more hardware under the hood than the One.

Having said that, as I pointed out elsewhere, it's now how many things your device does, but how well it does the thing that'll define its function. If it's an entertainment system, it's how well it entertains people. If it's a videogame, it's how fun the games it plays are.

[shock-value]

Not necessarily -- the Xbox include a Kinect in the box which will increase its price/lower its profit margin. The PS4 has a camera but nothing as sophisticated/expensive as the Kinect.

[sp332]

Exactly, the developer experience is very important, and hardware is only an issue if you're really pushing the limits. Differences in SDK made a huge difference in popularity between the PS3 and the 360. Since the 360 handled background music, matchmaking, and voice chat natively, devs had a huge head start over competitors on the PS3. Helping out the devs had a direct effect on the players' experience, which led to the 360's dominance in multiplayer games.

[Bosence]

I believe they used to make the previous console at a loss, because they generate most of their profits through the sales of games and accessories. I believe.

[wmf]

The extra CUs in the PS4 are offset by the ESRAM in the One; I would expect the die size is similar. Sony has more expensive RAM, though.

[illuminate]

And the rest of the ecosystem. I do hope the new incarnation of Live allows for PC/One simultaneous play.

[hadem]

It it really necessary that the article be split between multiple pages. At first I wondered, "where is the comparison" until I found the drop down menu...

[wmf]

It is "necessary" in the sense that AnandTech would be out of business otherwise.

[programminggeek]

The only reason I could see that Microsoft would make the choices they did was to save on cost or to be easier to scale up to 10's of millions of units a year by getting higher/cheaper chip yields faster than Sony can with basically identical chips. The only way that Microsoft can capitalize on that advantage will be to actually have a lower price faster since they don't have a one year head start this time.

Nintendo's only shot right now is to cut price on the Wii U.

Just remember that historically the magic number for console sales is $199. That's why the Xbox 360's entry price is $199 now and the Wii worked so well at $249 with a bundled game (basically $199 console + pack in game).

Mobile devices the sweet spot is more like say $150, which is why the DS did better than the PSP, 3DS than the Vita and so on.

Price makes a huge difference on consumer products and getting to certain price points can be the difference between success and failure other things being basically equal.

[aclevernickname]

So, I have a Linux Desktop PC, with 8GB of RAM, and an AMD A10 processor. I'm running XBMC (or LXDE or Front Row), and running 5 VM's on it under KVM. Cost about $450 when I bought it. price is about $570 now.

I've had this setup (with a slightly slower AMD proc) for over 2 years, and I've been running BSNES, Dolphin, PCSX2, Nestopia, and MAME fairly regularly. Today's announcement informed me that I've been enjoying much of the next-generation gaming experience already, without any of the DRM Sony and Microsoft promise to include with their systems.

[joenathan]

>I've been enjoying much of the next-generation gaming experience already.

You can't be serious. Although you can very soon be enjoying the next-generation gaming experience, what's exciting to me about this as a PC gamer is that all next gen games will be designed with x86 in mind, which should make porting trivial compared to this generation.

[pandaman]

Even if you had the same GPU and CPU (which you don't, there had not been 8 core/12CU GCN APUs two years ago, I doubt you can buy them even now) you still would be far away from the console experience because the PC games cannot access the GPU directly and rely on slow and inefficient APIs.

[michielvoo]

I understand that native Xbox 360 games will not run on Xbox One, but games developed using XNA should be able to run if Microsoft ports the CLR to Xbox One no?

[teamonkey]

XNA has been discontinued. I wouldn't expect Microsoft to port the CLR.

[Tomdarkness]

Edit: Removed. Been quite a while since I played with XNA, totally forgot they discontinued it.

[fuzzywalrus]

It's an interesting break down but ultimately the software will be the ultimate factor.

[qompiler]

tl;dr:

Sony PS4 has a better CPU and GPU

[godgod]

There is no way in hell I'm going to buy the Xbox one always online spy box. Skype has a backdoor.