Microsoft issues a full spec breakdown for the Xbox Series S (and X)

Microsoft has announced the Xbox Series S, a new kind of console that will be available alongside the Series X. The OEM claims that the two have many properties in common, including the Xbox Velocity Architecture memory-optimizers for their RDNA GPUs. However, there are many important areas in which they do diverge.

The Series S does have an octa-core 7 nanometer (nm) CPU with AMD's Zen 2, all right; however, it is clocked at 3.6GHz, or 3.4GHz with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) on, whereas the Series X' chipset is 3.8/3.6GHz in the same respects. Its graphics processor has 20 compute units (CUs) at 1.565GHz, whereas that of the X gets 52 at 1.825GHz, which bumps the teraflops (TFLOPs) up to 12.15 in its case.

This discrepancy may be related to the Series S' max resolution of 1440p, as opposed to 4K in its full-fat new sibling. Microsoft asserts that this suits gamers who value frame-rate over this spec, as the S can support a maximum of 120fps (then again, so can the X).

Furthermore, the Series S gets 10GB of GDDR6 DRAM (whereas the X has 16GB), distributed across 8GB with a speed of 224GB per second (GB/s) and 2GB at 56GB/s (while even the smaller 6GB module in the Series X has 336GB/s?...is this a typo? Hopefully Microsoft will clarify it soon).

Besides this, the S has an NVMe SSD with PCIe Gen 4 at a transfer rate of 2.4GHz (uncompressed) or 4.8GHz (compressed), same as the Series X, although the latter gets a 1TB internal capacity while the former gets half of that. Both consoles will also support HDMI 2.1, and will support Spatial Sound, Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision for streaming and gaming.

Those specs may come in handy as the new Microsoft consoles will support Vudu, Disney+ and Netflix on their launch. This event will not take place until November 2020, although they will be available to pre-order 11 days from today (September 9, 2020).