As you are well aware, there is a sizable gap between the hardware specifications of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. While both chips have fairly similar custom-built AMD APUs, the PS4 is equipped with a GPU that has 50% more cores (and thus about 50% more raw power) than the Xbox One. On the CPU side of things, the Xbox One actually has about a 10% advantage over the PS4 due to a higher clock speed. But who says this will always be the case? It’s not unusual for a console to be tweaked or upgraded multiple times throughout its lifetime as new (cheaper) hardware becomes available. Because both consoles use fairly standard PC hardware, could Sony or Microsoft upgrade their consoles to close (or widen) the current performance gap?
The short answer is yes, there’s no reason Sony or Microsoft couldn’t approach AMD and ask for a faster, beefier APU. The real answer, as you can probably imagine, is a lot more complex than that.
The Xbox One APU. It could theoretically be upgraded to a bigger CPU or GPU, but in practice it’s unlikely.
While a lot has been said about the PS4 and Xbox One being almost PCs, it’s important to note that, from the perspective of the developer, they’re still very much an appliance. When you develop a game for the PC, you design the game so that it can gracefully scale up and down depending on the available resources (CPU, GPU, RAM). When you develop a game for a console, you target a very specific hardware setup. This is actually a good thing as far as the developer is concerned, because you can guarantee that the console will have certain resources available, and can thus hard-code the game to make optimal use of those resources. This is why PS2 and PS3 games became very impressive towards the end of their lives, as developers finally sussed out all of the Emotion Engine/Cell processor secrets.
The problem is, if you change the hardware of a game console just a tiny bit, all of those hard-coded optimizations suddenly break. If your game leverages some quirk in the ESRAM of the Xbox One, and the Microsoft goes and fixes (breaks) that quirk, then suddenly your game stops working. Likewise, if the developer hand-tweaks the number of polygons on-screen at any one time to ensure the console’s GPU can stick to 60 fps, then upgrading the GPU isn’t likely to do much of anything. Even worse, if any developers do decide to target the new version of the console with upgraded hardware, then consumers with the old version of the console won’t be able to play the game.
Upgrading a console’s hard drive is easy; the CPU or GPU, not so much
This is why, historically, consoles have remained virtually unchanged throughout their life cycle. Historically it was fairly normal for the console maker to reduce costs by stepping down to a new process node, or by integrating multiple components into a single big chip, but a huge amount of care was taken to ensure that the performance, timings, and quirks of the new hardware exactly matched the original version of the console. I’m not aware of any console hardware revision that increased CPU speed, or RAM size or speed.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that other parts of the console can’t be upgraded. As we’ve seen in the past, the console maker can increase the size of the hard drive (or remove it entirely), or remove various sockets/features from the logic board to reduce costs/hackability. Some features, like the console’s WiFi or Ethernet adapter, could be safely upgraded to the newest/fastest standard.
Original PS2 system board (top) vs. the newer PS2 Slimline (bottom). Note the two big chips (GS and EE) have merged into one chip (under the grey cover).
Having said all that, I could be wrong. Maybe the PS4 and Xbox One are more upgradable than their forebears. If developers are actually sticking to the official SDK and not wandering too far off-piste, then it might actually be possible to upgrade the CPU and RAM without too much difficulty (I’m still very doubtful about the GPU, due to backwards compatibility with older consoles). These upgrades probably wouldn’t boost gaming performance very much, but the console might boot up faster, switch between apps faster, and offer better multitasking capabilities. Another possibility is that Microsoft or Sony could release an abstraction (emulation) layer that allows older software to run on upgraded hardware, but I think this is unlikely.
I think the only scenario where we might see a significant CPU or GPU upgrade is if the Xbox One still can’t hit 1080p @ 60 fps by the time second-generation games roll around. Diehards are holding onto onto the hope that the Xbox One’s ESRAM will be the secret weapon that gets the console up to a stable 1080p @ 60 fps — but we’ll have to wait and see.
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