Xbox One System On A Chip (SoC) Compared To PlayStation 4, PC Video Cards
The Xbox One System On a Chip (SoC) design is being scrutinized, with some already making comparison to the graphics processing units (GPUs) of the PlayStation 4 and PC video cards.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, the planned Xbox One GPU boost means the Xbone will be running an eight core 1.6 GHz processor and a 853 MHz graphics processing unit (GPU) with 768 shader cores and 48 Texture Mapping Units (TMU) inside the Xbox One System On a Chip.
The Xbox One System On a Chip is actually called an Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), which combines both the CPU and the GPU into one physical package along with other functionality. Both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One System On a Chip are being designed by the same company named AMD. Current AMD technology has the ability to dynamically alter fans speeds and CPU/GPU clock speeds so it’s expected PlayStation 4 hardware failures and Xbox One Red Rings of Death should be more avoidable.
The Xbox One System On a Chip is 363 mm², contains five billion transistors, and is being manufactured on a 28-nanometer process by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The Xbox One SoC includes 32 megabytes of on-chip storage and 47 megabytes of high speed embedded memory (eSRAM), which is similar in design to the Xbox 360 GPU. The PlayStation 4, on the other hand, foregoes the eSRAM and relies on higher bandwidth GDDR5 memory. The Xbox One SoC will provide 204 gigabytes per second (GB/s) of bandwidth internally and 68 GB/s externally.
As a comparison, the Xbox One System On a Chip is closest in size to the 4.3 billion transistors of the Tahiti GPU which powers the PC video card the Radeon HD7970. But that’s where the comparison ends. The PC video cards operate at much higher frequencies, have 2048 stream processors, and 128 TMUs.
All in all, the Xbox One System On a Chip might be very large but that’s mostly because of the high speed cache and storage memory. Based upon current expectations of performance, the Xbox One SoC APU’s GPU could be compared to the AMD Radeon HD7770 and the PlayStation 4 is said to be somewhere between the HD7850 and HD7870.
What do you think about the Xbox One System On a Chip design?
