Microsoft has finally announced the next-phase of roll-out for its latest-generation home console, the Xbox One. Starting September 2014, 26 new markets will get retail availability of the Xbox One console, including South Africa. For now, pricing details and exact launch dates have not been disclosed.
Making the announcement via a post on the official Xbox blog on Tuesday, Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi said, “It’s time to ensure even more fans around the world can enjoy Xbox One. So today we’re proud to share that it will be available in 26 additional markets in September this year. We’ll have much more to share at a local level towards the end of April, so stay tuned.”
Notably Microsoft’s primary competitor in the home console space, Sony, launched its PlayStation 4 console in India in January, less than two months after its US launch. To puts things in perspective, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 were launched in November within a week of each other in the US.
Shortly after its US launch however, the Sony PlayStation 4 was rolled out to roughly 53 countries in the first phase. In comparison, Microsoft’s Xbox One was in its first phase only rolled out to 13 countries.
Full list of 26 new countries in September phase of Xbox One global roll-out: Argentina, Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia , Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and UAE.
Both the Microsoft Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4 sport an integrated CPU-GPU design by AMD, featuring an 8-core low power x86-64 AMD “Jaguar” CPU. The Xbox One’s CPU cores are clocked at 1.75GHz, compared to the Sony PlayStation 4’s 1.6GHz.
While this difference in clock speed is relatively insignificant, the implementation of the GPUs seem certain to create some differences in performance. The Xbox One features a GPU similar to the entry-level Bonaire GPU found on the Radeon HD 7790, while the PlayStation 4 features a GPU similar to the mid-range Pitcairn GPU found on the Radeon HD 7870. While the GPU clock speed is higher on the Xbox One, the difference in GPU processing performance should be tangible.
Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 feature 8GB of RAM, though while Sony has opted for the much faster 5500MHz GDDR5 RAM on its console, Microsoft has gone in for 2133MHz DDR3 RAM on the Xbox One, giving the Japanese manufacturer another advantage that may not be offset by the Xbox One’s implementation of ESRAM (all 32MB of it) for caching purposes.
Just like the PS4, the Xbox One also sports a 500GB hard disk drive, a Blu-ray disc and DVD drive, USB 3.0, AUX port, Ethernet, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 (EDR), an HDMI out port, and an optical-out port.
Source: NDTV
