AMD are the providers for all three next-gen consoles which is a fantastic achievement in itself. The XBOX ONE and the PlayStation 4 utilise the latest technology that AMD can deliver to the masses. Both of the consoles will be using AMDs “Jaguar” cores which are 64-bit and built on the x86 architecture. Whilst they may appear to be very similar on the outside, it is a different story on the inside and we will detail as to why this is the case.
The XBOX ONE features eight Jaguar cores which are clocked at 1.6GHz and the GPU will come with 768 stream processors. The RAM will be 8GB of quad-channel DDR3-2133MHz memory which will offer a bandwidth of 68.3GBps, something significantly lower than the PlayStation 4. The memory in the system will be shared in a similar way to that of the PlayStation 4 but there is a subtle difference – SRAM. There will be 32MB of SRAM cache which operates at 102GBps, which is still slower than Sony’s offering, but it is said that it will offer “200GBps of memory bandwidth”, according to the Microsoft engineers. This will be achievable by joining various system memory types together.
The PlayStation 4’s chip will also feature eight Jaguar cores which will be clocked at 1.6GHz and it will also have an on-board Radeon GPU which will pack 1156 stream processors, 32 ROPs and a 256-bit memory interface which gives it an effective memory bandwidth of 176GBps. However, what is different about this is that the system will use 8GB of GDDR5 RAM as both its graphics memory and system memory. The system can use the RAM for either CPU tasks or RAM tasks.
Both platforms use their own and unique operating systems. The XBOX ONE will be using one which software developers are more familiar with whilst the PlayStation 4 will be using something a little different. The XBOX ONE is built on a 64-bit Windows NT 6.x operating system and it will be running DirectX 11 API. The PlayStation 4 will be running a custom, Unix based operating system with OpenGL 4.2 API.
So, as you can see, the PlayStation 4 is by far the better machine on paper. However, how will it translate into real-world differences when the games are produced? Will the PlayStation 4 be that much better?
