Microsoft fully pulled back the curtain on the hardware powering the Xbox Series X on Monday, going deep in both an Xbox blog and an inside look provided to Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry. The disclosures didn’t divulge much beyond what we already knew or could discern but made one thing abundantly clear: Microsoft’s next-gen console will put most gaming PCs to shame.
We knew that the Xbox Series X would feature AMD’s kick-ass Ryzen CPU cores, but now we know it’s the full monty. The console will come with an 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen implementation, running at a locked clock speed. That clock speed will vary depending on whether game developers want to tap into all those threads, or decide to stick to the eight physical cores alone for slightly faster single-thread performance. The chip will run at 3.8GHz if a game sticks to the physical CPU cores, or 3.66GHz if developers open up the full 16 threads.
