The New Xbox One

As many of you already know Microsoft announced on may 21st that the new console will be released on November of this current year and will be competing with Sony´s PlayStation 4 and Nintendo´s Wii U as part of the eight generation of video game consoles. Microsoft and various publications have placed the device as an ¨all-in-one entertainment system¨ making the Xbox One a rival competitor to the other home media devices such as the Google TV and the Apple TV platform.

To my surprise the initial reaction to the Xbox One was not such as positive as I thought, mostly negative. Initial reviews praised the console´s new features, while others criticized its lack of backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 games, mandatory integration with Kinect, online connectivity requirements, and ambiguous restrictions on the resale and sharing of used games for the console. In response to these criticisms, I am pleased to say that Microsoft announced they would be dropping most of the originally planned digital rights management and Internet connection requirements! A smart move from Microsoft that will now make the Xbox One a true contender to the PS4. With Microsoft´s move I am quite sure Sony has been left with their jaw open and now calculating new ways to criticize the rival console, but what can they possibly say now? I mean, to me the better console now is the Xbox One. I will definitely be looking forward to buying the Xbox One over the PS4.

Now for the Specs:

The Xbox One has an APU with eight x86-64 cores, 8 GB of DDR3 RAM with a memory bandwidth of 68.3 GB/s, a 500 GB non-replaceable hard drive, and a Blu-ray Disc optical drive. Kotaku, Game Informer, and Gizmodo state that 3 GB of RAM will be reserved for the operating system and apps, leaving 5 GB for games. The graphics processing unit (GPU) is based on an AMD GCN architecture with 12 compute units, which have a total of 768 cores, providing an estimated peak theoretical power of 1.23 TFLOPS. For networking, the Xbox One supports Gigabit Ethernet. 802.11n wireless, and Wi-Fi Direct.
The Xbox One will support 4K resolution (3840×2160) video output and 7.1 surround sound. Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of marketing and strategy for Microsoft, has stated that there is no hardware restriction that would prevent games from running at 4K resolution. The Xbox One will support HDMI 1.4 for both input and output. The Xbox One does not have a video output for either composite or component video.