Said the Microsoft spokesperson:

Ten years ago, you could argue that a console’s power was summed up in terms of a few of its specs, but Xbox One is designed as a powerful machine to deliver the best blockbuster games today and for the next decade.

Xbox One architecture is much more complex than what any single figure can convey. It was designed with balanced performance in mind, and we think the games we continue to show running on near-final hardware demonstrate that performance. In the end, we’ll let the consoles and their games speak for themselves.

And the battle wages on, and it’s true, isn’t it? Letting the games speak for themselves… Maybe this should end an argument that’s been raging since the consoles were announced, only problem for MS is it ends with the positive mindshare belonging to Sony: PS4 — 50 percent more powerful than Xbox One.

Okay then, well let the games talk. Hopefully this doesn’t happen.

“We want to make sure that consumers have an opportunity to buy one on November 15 and through the holidays,” Tretton said, “so we’re holding back some inventory to make sure that people have an opportunity to buy one that come in on launch day.”

“But we can pre-sell every unit we can manufacture and the good news, production yields have been phenomenal, so this will be by a magnitude of a lot the biggest launch we’ve ever had.”

Good news. Let’s hope that everyone who wants a PS4 this holiday season is able to find the hotly anticipated machine.

Well today, Penello was caught red-handed by knowledgeable people on the popular gaming forum, turning the situation into a monumental mess for Microsoft and its Xbox One.

Here’s Penello’s post about the power difference between PS4 and Xbox One:

I see my statements the other day caused more of a stir than I had intended. I saw threads locking down as fast as they pop up, so I apologize for the delayed response.

I was hoping my comments would lead the discussion to be more about the games (and the fact that games on both systems look great) as a sign of my point about performance, but unfortunately I saw more discussion of my credibility.

So I thought I would add more detail to what I said the other day, that perhaps people can debate those individual merits instead of making personal attacks. This should hopefully dismiss the notion I’m simply creating FUD or spin.

I do want to be super clear: I’m not disparaging Sony. I’m not trying to diminish them, or their launch or what they have said. But I do need to draw comparisons since I am trying to explain that the way people are calculating the differences between the two machines isn’t completely accurate. I think I’ve been upfront I have nothing but respect for those guys, but I’m not a fan of the mis-information about our performance.

So, here are couple of points about some of the individual parts for people to consider:

• 18 CU’s vs. 12 CU’s =/= 50% more performance. Multi-core processors have inherent inefficiency with more CU’s, so it’s simply incorrect to say 50% more GPU.
• Adding to that, each of our CU’s is running 6% faster. It’s not simply a 6% clock speed increase overall.
• We have more memory bandwidth. 176gb/sec is peak on paper for GDDR5. Our peak on paper is 272gb/sec. (68gb/sec DDR3 + 204gb/sec on ESRAM). ESRAM can do read/write cycles simultaneously so I see this number mis-quoted.
• We have at least 10% more CPU. Not only a faster processor, but a better audio chip also offloading CPU cycles.
• We understand GPGPU and its importance very well. Microsoft invented Direct Compute, and have been using GPGPU in a shipping product since 2010 – it’s called Kinect.
• Speaking of GPGPU – we have 3X the coherent bandwidth for GPGPU at 30gb/sec which significantly improves our ability for the CPU to efficiently read data generated by the GPU.

Hopefully with some of those more specific points people will understand where we have reduced bottlenecks in the system. I’m sure this will get debated endlessly but at least you can see I’m backing up my points.

I still I believe that we get little credit for the fact that, as a SW company, the people designing our system are some of the smartest graphics engineers around – they understand how to architect and balance a system for graphics performance. Each company has their strengths, and I feel that our strength is overlooked when evaluating both boxes.

Given this continued belief of a significant gap, we’re working with our most senior graphics and silicon engineers to get into more depth on this topic. They will be more credible then I am, and can talk in detail about some of the benchmarking we’ve done and how we balanced our system.

Thanks again for letting my participate. Hope this gives people more background on my claims.

Immediately, knowledgeable people realized that Penello was just being a regular PR mouthpiece for Microsoft, using NeoGAF as his platform. Here are some of the responses he got:

→ I do not mean to offend when I ask this but who typed up this nonsense for you. 272gb/s peak on paper. What rubbish is this? I study computer science for a living and this is garbage. Creative engineering and fud at its best. You do not have anywhere close to a 272gb/s peak at all. It’s one thing to beat around the Bush but it’s another to straight up lie. The fact that esram can only move 32mb at the previously reported 194gb/s peak should point to the kind of nonsense you are spreading. The majority of the data on the ram can only move at 68gb/s. I’m not even going to bother with the other nonsense in this post. It’s truly embarrassing that you can come up here and type this nonsense. You do not just add up bandwidth numbers like that. Shameful.

→ Really love to have one of your “tech guy” explain how esram reads & writes at the same time.

Gpu have a lot more than just CU. PS4 have 100% advantage in other key areas on the GPU that you did not even talk about.

→ I really don’t want to be disrespectful. And just to prevent unproductive ad hominems from others about being an engineer and not being an engineer, I am an engineer, but this statement of yours really does not make any sense at all.

→ This is insulting. And I am not even a tech guru. You don’t just add bandwidth as ESRAM is not all of 8GB.

→ I don’t understand how these two statements are logically consistent.

By the distributive property:

(X + X + … + X) * 1.06 = 1.06*X + 1.06*X + … + 1.06*X.

And that’s assuming the CUs work linearly.

Unless I’m misunderstanding you, you said the exact opposite — having additional CUs does not result in a linear increase in power.

Therefore, your statement is actually THE OPPOSITE of what you are pointing out:

(X + X + … + X) * 1.06 > 1.06*X + 1.06*X + … + 1.06*X.

But then, by your very own logic, having each CU running 6% faster is actually **worse** than a 6% increase overall.

→ I know you think you gain something by coming on here and giving us the PR message but a lot of us know a little about what we are talking about here. Putting the “peak bw” nonsense just rubs me the wrong way.

→ Enough… Seriously man, just stop this. It looks no better when you comment on how “we don’t know the full story from MS’ side” when the exact same thing can very well be said about your perspective on Sony’s hardware and engineering. And again, you comment on this with an extremely obvious bias in the discussion. I don’t think it’s beneficial for you to participate in these discussions; again, I feel like it’s going to do more damage to people’s perspective of your (and other MS representatives’) participation on these forums when you come in here and start engaging in hardware comparisons with your direct competition.

→ So, didn’t you earlier state you don’t know what Sony are doing with their console but now you know their unannounced CPU clocks?

→ That’s odd because the PS4 does not have 10gb/sec bandwidth, I believe you are making a mistake regarding onion, onion+ and onion(+) buses.

→ You’re only speaking on one side… yet you keep bringing up the point as if the hardware in Sony’s PS4 is just that, with nothing else to it.

→ I’m very disappointed in this magic math right there. I hope the upcoming post by your graphics people is a bit more honest with the real world numbers.
(I don’t think saying “on paper” is a get-out-of-jail-free card.)

→ So much wrong with that post.

Graphics are a embarrassing parallel load, that means you have very little scaling hit.
You do not address the massive ROP difference, which will make it even faster than just having more CUs alone.

I do not see anything that points to it not being just a simple clockspeed increase.

→ You can not add up the bandwidth like that!
The PS4 can do its peak bandwidth across all 8GB vs a system that only has 68GB/S from it’s main RAM and the majorly of it’s bandwidth comes from a tiny (32MB) pool of SRAM!

These are just some of the gamers and tech people on NeoGAF who called out Penello, and there are countless more.

My Take:

I don’t think Microsoft should be talking about PS4′s specs when it has no knowledge of what Sony’s doing outside of what the public knows… Especially when Microsoft itself is saying Sony, nor the public truly knows how Xbox One specs work. Furthermore, going to NeoGAF and trying to disparage your competitor’s console, one that is so obviously more powerful and better built than yours, is a recipe for disaster. But that’s been the Xbox One’s story all along, hasn’t it?

Microsoft has been trying its best to get Xbox One on the right path, and in recent times they’ve somewhat succeeded in doing just that. However recent moves by the firm’s executives haven’t played out so well.

Through a process of extrapolation from the drip-feed of hard facts, the make-up of the One’s GPU is confirmed – 12 compute units each capable of 64 ops/clock gives us the 768 total revealed by Microsoft and thus, by extension, the 1.2 teraflop graphics core.

So that’s another tick on the Durango leaked spec that has been transposed across to the final Xbox One architecture and the proof we need that PlayStation 4′s 18 CU graphics core has 50 per cent more raw power than the GPU in the new Microsoft console.

But that’s not all. Microsoft also went with GDDR3 RAM where Sony chose GDDR5, the latter being a much faster and efficient tech than the former. Thing is, Microsoft, because of its unflinching focus on TV and other multimedia offerings for Xbox One, had to secure RAM at an early stage of the console’s development, while Sony on the other hand could chase a moving target.

Here’s how DF puts it:

The answer to that comes down to a specific gamble Sony made that Microsoft could not – the utilisation of a unified pool of GDDR5 memory. In the early days of PS4 development, only 2GB of this type of memory looked viable for a consumer-level device. As higher density modules became available, this was duly upgraded to 4GB. By the time of the reveal back in February, Sony had confidence that it could secure volume of 512MB modules and surprised everyone (even developers) by announcing that PS4 would ship with 8GB of unified GDDR5 RAM. The design of its surrounding architecture would not need to change throughout this process – one set of 16 GDDR5 chips would simply be swapped out for another.

Microsoft never had the luxury of this moving target. With multimedia such a core focus for its hardware, it set out to support 8GB of RAM from day one (at the time giving it a huge advantage over the early PS4 target RAM spec) and with serious volume of next-gen DDR4 unattainable in the time window, it zeroed in on supporting DDR3 and doing whatever was necessary to make that work on a console. The result is a complex architecture – 32MB of ESRAM is added to the processor die, along with “data move engines” to courier information around the system as quickly as possible with bespoke encode/decode hardware to alleviate common bottlenecks. Bottom line: if you’re wondering why Xbox One has a weaker GPU than PlayStation 4, it’s because both platform holders have similar silicon budgets for the main processor – Sony has used the die-space for additional compute units and ROPs (32 vs. 16 in One), while Microsoft has budgeted for ESRAM and data move engines instead. From the Xbox perspective, it’s just unfortunate for Microsoft that Sony’s gamble paid off – right up until the wire, it was confident of shipping with twice the amount of RAM as PlayStation 4.

So PS4 is now way more powerful than Xbox One and that, it seems, is final.

Source: Digital Foundry.