What if Microsoft took advantage of the progress made by AMD on the engraving of its processors to improve its home consoles?
In the history of video games, consoles have never been very upgradeable machines. There are a few examples of technical improvements such as the SuperFX cartridges for Super Nintendo or the 32X module for SEGA's Megadrive, but on the whole, hardware improvements have always been the prerogative of PCs. This is part of the reason for the longevity of the platform, while home consoles are now in their ninth generation. Without talking about updating a machine that's already on the market, Microsoft and Sony have taken advantage of the eighth generation - the PS4 and Xbox One - to bring various variants to market. They may well do it again very soon.
Thus, the always well-informed Moore's Law is Dead, a Youtuber, puts forward a hypothesis far from being far-fetched: that of seeing Microsoft take advantage of the improvements made by AMD / TSMC on the engraving process of the main components of the Xbox Series to improve the consoles. At first, it will be a question of updating the "small model" of the new range, Xbox Series S. This one should still take advantage of the same architecture, but by exploiting a 6nm engraving process (against 7nm), AMD would be able to unlock certain features: it could thus count on 24 compute units against 20 on the current model. Of course, these numbers are only theoretical, but while the Xbox Series S currently on sale can offer "only" 4 TFLOPs of computing power, the "new" Xbox Series S would exceed 5 TFLOPs.
At first sight, this change should not lead to any real cost overrun of the Xbox Series S and could compete with a hypothetical PlayStation 5 Slim, while Sony is currently in a more favorable position. Another important piece of information is that Microsoft could be tempted to change its "big model", the Xbox Series X. Here, things are even less precise and if the evolution of the Xbox Series S could take place before the end of 2022, we should not expect to see anything better on the Xbox Series X side before 2023, in the best case. Our colleagues from Videocardz have compiled the (rare) information available about this Xbox Series S. To be continued as we say in this kind of situation.
