Microsoft's "little" next-generation console is a powerhouse whose design emphasizes remarkable integration.
A few weeks before the launch of the PlayStation 5, Sony had the surprising idea of publishing a video in which Yasuhiro Ootori, the vice president of Sony's hardware design department, completely dismantled the console. "The video was surprising, but particularly interesting in that it gave a clearer idea of the components used, the quality of manufacture, the level of finish and the options offered by the Japanese company.
While it was also releasing a new generation of consoles, Microsoft never saw fit to offer such a video teardown. However, since the American company doesn't want to do it, Digital Foundry decided to do it. However, the Youtube channel did not take care of the Xbox Series X. This one had been dismantled with the question of reparability in mind by the specialists of iFixIt. Digital Foundry decided to take a look at the Xbox Series S, the "small" model.
Remember that the Xbox Series S is built around the same generation of AMD SoC, but in a very different configuration, much less powerful. The 8 Zen 2 CPU cores signed by AMD are clocked at 3.4 GHz when they run at 3.6 GHz on the Xbox Series X, but it is especially the GPU part that is more limited: we are talking about 20 RDNA 2 computing units at 1.565 GHz when the Xbox Series X has 52 at 1.825 GHz. Nevertheless, these technical limits allow us to end up with a much more compact SoC (197 mm² compared to 360 mm² on the Xbox Series X) and a machine that consumes much less power (about 82 Watts compared to 170 Watts). A smaller SoC, lower power consumption and the console is logically much more compact than its big sister: 151 x 63 x 275 mm (volume of 2.6 liters) against 151 x 151 x 301 mm for the Xbox Series X (6.8 liters).
In the opinion of many specialists and despite a simultaneous release last November, the Xbox Series S could quickly suffer from the competition of the Xbox Series X. Everything will depend on the care developers take in designing their games so that they run as smoothly as possible on this well-equipped machine: it has as much memory as its big sister (10 GB of GDDR6) and a 512 GB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD: the capacity is lower than that of the Xbox Series X, but its performance seems to be very close.
