Microsoft gave us our first glimpse at the Xbox One during its #XboxReveal event. The angular, half matte and half glossy black box looked like a major departure from the Xbox 360, but the company didn't reveal the internal specifications until E3 in June.
As widely rumoured prior to the console's debut, the Xbox One is powered by an x86 Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) designed by AMD and based on its Jaguar processor architecture. This mirrors Sony's PS4, which also uses a custom-built APU from AMD. However, the PS4 has 18 compute units, compared to the Xbox One's 12, which could lead to a performance disparity when it comes to multi-format games.
n order to address this performance disparity, Microsoft announced that the Xbox One would receive a minor performance boost by the time the console launches. The GPU clock speed was originally set to be 800MHz, but will be 853MHz by the time the console goes on sale. Although this number sounds small, it could be enough to provide an overhead for anti-aliasing, or other graphical effects.
Microsoft has given the Xbox One 8GB of DDR3 RAM, which has a 68.3GB/s memory bandwidth, along with 32MB of embedded ESRAM. This faster memory has a theoretical memory bandwidth of 192GB/s, although 133GB/s simultaneous read/writes speeds look more likely for early launch titles at least until developers get to grips with the new hardware. 5GB of the 8GB DDR3 memory will be available to games, with the remaining 3GB reserved for the console's dual operating systems (more on that below).
Using off-the-shelf components should help Microsoft build systems faster than if it was fabricating its own chips, as well as cut down the learning curve for software developers, allowing games to be released faster.
XBOX ONE STORAGE AND BLU-RAY
The Xbox One will ship with a 500GB internal hard disk, along with a Blu-ray optical drive to play games and films. Initially, it was rumoured that the console wouldn't play Blu-ray movies, as Microsoft is pushing its Xbox Video streaming service, but thankfully this isn't the case.
The optical drive will install games to the hard disk in a similar manner to the way it does on the current Xbox 360, speeding up load times and keeping the console quiet as it won't need to read the disc during gameplay. Although we would have preferred to see a faster SSD, which would be faster, cooler and quieter than a mechanical disk, Microsoft would have struggled when it came to price.
XBOX ONE CONTROLLERS
The Xbox 360 controller is arguably one of the most comfortable and well-balaned we've ever used, so it's unsurprising that Microsoft hasn't made any drastic changes with the Xbox One controller.
The asymmetric analogue sticks make a return, as do the A, B, X and Y face buttons, triggers and bumper buttons. The triggers have gained vibration feedback, giving very fine and immediate response to your actions directly to your fingertips.
