You’ve likely heard the story about the rabbit who thought he was so unbeatable, he took a nap under a tree in the middle of a race because he figured no one would ever catch up to him. Because of that decision, a turtle blew past him and won that race. Sony reminds me a lot of that rabbit right now…they’re so convinced the Playstation can never be taken that they still hasn’t shown much of their next console, while Microsoft has taken advantage of that silence.
Today the House of XBox (and Windows) published a MASSIVE expose on the capabilities of the Series X. The entirety of the machine’s specs and guts were revealed, which you can view below:
CPUÂ Â Â Â Â Â 8x Cores @ 3.8 GHz (3.66 GHz w/ SMT) Custom Zen 2 CPU
GPUÂ Â Â Â Â Â 12 TFLOPS, 52 CUs @ 1.825 GHz Custom RDNA 2 GPU
Die Size      360.45 mm2
Process      7nm Enhanced
Memory      16 GB GDDR6 w/ 320mb bus
Memory Bandwidth      10GB @ 560 GB/s, 6GB @ 336 GB/s
Internal Storage      1 TB Custom NVME SSD
I/O Throughput      2.4 GB/s (Raw), 4.8 GB/s (Compressed, with custom hardware decompression block)
Expandable Storage     1 TB Expansion Card (matches internal storage exactly)
External Storage      USB 3.2 External HDD Support
Optical Drive      4K UHD Blu-Ray Drive
Performance Target     4K @ 60 FPS, Up to 120 FPS
In addition, they’ve released the world’s first Series X tech demos. They don’t focus on graphics, but on performance…for example, this demonstration of the Series X’s quick SSD loading time shows State of Decay 2 loading in just ten seconds. On the XBox One X, currently the most powerful model they sell, the same area takes 52 seconds to load.
This is a demonstration of the Quick Resume, which will blow away all similar features on rival consoles by boasting the ability to suspend multiple games at once. Here, Microsoft loads five games and switches effortlessly between them, right from where they left off each time.
Care to respond to this, Sony? Anytime now. Wake up from under that tree; this turtle is kicking your can! The XBox Series X will be out this holiday season.