PS4 Pro and Xbox One X processors compared at the silicon level
We knew the spec many months before its launch and gained insights on its core design from its system architect, but only now can we see the physical layout of PlayStation 4 Pro's central processor. The key takeaway? Add some memory controllers plus an extra four AMD Radeon compute units and the basic layout of the Pro's chip is very similar indeed to the physical make-up of the Scorpio Engine found within Microsoft's Xbox One X. Putting the two chips side by side reveals just how close today's consoles are, and how innovative design choices and more memory pushed Microsoft's hardware ahead of its rival.
Quite how we have photographic imagery of PS4 Pro's silicon is a fascinating story in itself. For a while now, we've been tracking the this Flickr account, which produces some truly remarkable work. Essentially, 'Fritzchens Fritz' takes a processor from its host mainboard, uses extreme heat to prise the chip away from its housing, then uses a remarkable process taking several hours to remove the layers of the chip, exposing the physical make-up of the processor itself, which is then photographed under extreme magnification. It's a process reliant on hardware donations, so from a somewhat selfish perspective, if anyone has a defective Xbox One S or PS4 Slim they can offer up for the cause, well, we'd love the chance to see the composition of these second-gen smaller, cooler 16nm processors.
But returning to the subject at hand, this new look at the Pro's physical layout offers up some interesting insights. For example, when the specs were first revealed, the amount of hardware shaders looked very much like AMD's Polaris 10 processor as found in today's RX 580, which has 36 GPU compute units giving a total of 2304 shaders.
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