Earlier this week, Eurogamer posted an excerpt from a long interview with two of Microsoft Xbox One hardware engineers, where they revealed that game developers will be able to access the 10 percent of the console's GPU that's being used for other features sometime in the future. Now, the website has posted the full interview with the engineers, Andrew Goossen and Nick Baker, where the two men go deep into hardware details for the Xbox One.

The highly technical interview has lots of information for hardware junkies, including more on the Xbox One's custom APU, which Microsoft co-designed with AMD. The CPU has eight cores based on AMD's Jaguar design. When asked why Microsoft picked this configuration instead of four Piledriver-based cores, Baker stated:

The extra power and area associated with getting that additional IPC boost going from Jaguar to Piledriver... It's not the right decision to make for a console. Being able to hit the sweet spot of power/performance per area and make it a more parallel problem. That's what it's all about. How we're partitioning cores between the title and the operating system works out as well in that respect.

The Xbox One has 15 processors inside the system on a chip, according to Baker, "eight inside the audio block, four move engines, one video encode, one video decode and one video compositor/resizer." The audio block was designed completely by Microsoft and made to handle 512 simultaneous voices for audio in games. It can also handle the speech pre-processing for the Kinect add-on.

Posted: Oct 06, 2013 6:14 pm
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: http://www.neowin.net/news/microsofts-xbox-one-engineers-reveal-more-about-consoles-cpu