We're just a couple of months away from the launch of the Xbox One, and Xbox chief marketing officer at Microsoft, Yusuf Mehdi, has revealed that the console has entered full mass production. He also mentioned that final units will feature another speed boost, thanks to the hard work of the Xbox engineering team.
Mehdi revealed that the CPU inside the console's AMD-made APU has received a clock speed boost of 150 MHz, taking it from 1.6 GHz to 1.75 GHz. This follows news last month of a GPU clock speed increase, which brought the graphics processor up to 853 MHz from 800 MHz.
While the Xbox One has received some last minute performance boosts via clock speed increases, there are still areas of the system that will be inherently slower than Sony's PlayStation 4. Microsoft's console will still reportedly use 8 GB of DDR3 RAM for 63.8 GB/s of bandwidth, plus 32 MB of eSRAM for 108 GB/s of bandwidth, which is significantly slower than the PlayStation 4's GDDR5 memory with 170.6 GB/s of bandwidth.
The PlayStation 4's GPU is also theoretically up to 50% faster as it incorporates more shader processors: 1152 versus 768 in the Xbox One. While marginal clock speed boosts may have closed the gap in terms of performance differences, there still could be as much as a 600 GFLOPS differential in raw performance. However, with the majority of games coming from third-party developers, it's unlikely that gamers will notice the difference in performance of the next generation consoles; at least initially.
Microsoft has yet to announce specifically when the $499 Xbox One will launch, although it will happen sometime in November. Meanwhile, the PlayStation 4 will be available from November 15, priced at $399.
