Tweet
The next console war has yet to begin but the battle lines have already been drawn and the processing firepower available to Microsoft and Sony is now a known quantity. It's Durango vs. Orbis, and it's a console head-to-head quite unlike anything we've seen before. The raw technological building blocks powering each next-gen console are designed by the same people, and the raw architecture is almost identical in nature as a consequence. The differences between the two consoles are less pronounced than in any preceding console generation: fundamentally, Sony and Microsoft faced the exact same challenges and went to the same people to find the solution, resulting in very similar end-products. However, there are differences between Durango and Orbis, and they reflect how the platform holders envisage the evolution of the home console.We won't dwell too much on the known similarities between the two consoles, but we've already mentioned that both the next generation Xbox and its PlayStation competitor feature the same CPU - an eight-core AMD offering running at 1.6GHz and based on its forthcoming low-power, high-performance architecture, Jaguar. From a graphics perspective, AMD is also offering the same tech to both manufacturers: the GCN core, as found in the highly popular Radeon HD 7xxx graphics cards.
Here's where we see our first point of divergence: GPU rendering is all about spreading the computational load across many cores and we find that the new Xbox has 12 of these "Compute Units" (CUs), while Orbis has 18 - a 50 per cent advantage. These numbers have been hotly contested in the last couple of weeks but our Orbis sources confirm the Sony side of the equation, while SuperDAE's leak - in combination with proof of his claims supplied to us behind the scenes - confirms the Durango CU count. The information there is around nine months old, hailing from Durango's beta period - in theory, the hardware could be improved, but practically it's almost impossible for this to actually happen. You can't just slap on some extra hardware without setting back your production schedule significantly by many months.
Read more…
More...