Console Spec-tacular! - Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X Specs!!!

**Patrick Norton** (0:00)
Coming up with This Week in Computer Hardware, Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X, we got real specs, people. The new iPad Pro and Air get magic, some advice on choosing new audio gear, and some help picking out GPUs. All that and more coming up next on Twitch. This Week in Computer Hardware has brought you from LastPass Studios. Keeping passwords on notes or spreadsheets doesn't work anymore. LastPass easily keeps track and creates unique passwords for every site you visit. Visit lastpass.com/twit. Podcasts you love.
This is TWiT.
This is TWiT's This Week in Computer Hardware, episode 558, recorded on March 19th, 2020 It's a console spectacular. Welcome to TWiT's This Week in Computer Hardware, TWiT's weekly show that aims to bring you all the hardware news with minimal COVID-19 coverage, because quite frankly, that's what everybody else is talking about. I'm Patrick Norton, joined as always by Mr. Sebastian Peak, editor-in-chief PC Perr. Sir, have you begun to hack yet?

**Sebastian Peak** (1:10)
No, if by hacking, I mean cough.
No. I had to think about that for a second.

**Patrick Norton** (1:18)
Oh my goodness. You know, the nice thing about being a feral nerd, which counts many of your hosts and the people listening to the show today, is that social distancing just feels like Tuesday, but with more intensity. A little familial joke there.
We should probably just skip straight to the hardware news. A bunch of Apple news this week, a bunch of console news this week. You're kind of stoked about what's going on with the Xbox and the Playstation, I think in no small part, because actual details seem to be emerging.

**Sebastian Peak** (1:52)
For anybody who follows PC hardware, like I do, we've been waiting for hard specs. We've seen rumors for a while about what this was going to include. We already knew that the new generation consoles from both Sony and Microsoft were going to have AMD inside. So the newest Zen 2 architecture for the CPUs, which you've already seen for desktop. And they were also going to feature the second generation of AMD's RDNA architecture.
And exactly what that includes, we haven't really been briefed on that yet from AMD, but it's kind of nice because we're getting a preview of desktop here, starting with the Series X, which they've revealed has eight cores. So it's eight custom Zen 2 cores. They're going to be running at, it says 3.8 gigahertz, or 3.6 gigahertz with SMT.
This is something, I know there's been some discussion about this, we could have a separate discussion about this another time, whether or not having SMT, which is symmetrical multiprocessing, a lot of people know it as hyperthreading on the Intel side, how that impacts gaming performance, sort of interesting discussion, turning it off apparently can sometimes increase single threaded boost numbers, that sort of thing. But the GPU is what's really impressive here. Xbox is going to have, the Series X is going to have a custom RDNA 2 GPU with 12 teraflops of performance. This is based on 52 compute units, which is approaching, it's higher than what we have on desktop currently, first of all.

**Patrick Norton** (3:30)
I was going to say, it's like a real computer, but more so.

**Sebastian Peak** (3:33)
Yeah, like the current high-end AMD graphics card, since the Radeon 7 was discontinued anyway, is the RX 5700 XT that has 40 compute units, if I'm not forgetting.
This is significantly higher, 52 And it's apparently clocked at 1.825 GHz.
So, and then other specs that round this out, 16 gigs of memory. That's the number we saw first with the Radeon 7 card. Of course, this is going to be GDDR6 and not high bandwidth memory. And it's partition, which is kind of interesting. The 10 gigs are graphics, and then the remaining six are split between the operating system and other reserved memory. And then it has a one terabyte, they're describing it as a custom NVMe SSD. So other specs are available from Microsoft. It's interesting. I also appreciate the fact that actually both of these new consoles are going to have a UHD Blu-ray drive built in, which of course the Xbox already has. But as we move on to Sony, that's something that they've added as well, finally. Even the PS4 Pro didn't have a UHD drive. It's kind of surprising because it's a Sony product, but that's another discussion, I guess.
So, I mean, these are really powerful specs, and they're more powerful than anything we have on desktop right now, at least from AMD. 12 teraflops is a lot. That's not quite up to the level of an RTX 2080 Ti, but you're getting close to an RTX 2080 And we all know that consoles, they kind of get down to the metal more. They optimize for the hardware a little bit better than they tend to on PC. So developers are going to be able to get a lot out of this, in theory.