UPDATED: At bottom.
Despite Microsoft turning the Xbox One to a Xbox 180 of its policies, is there a real difference between the PS4 and Xbox One? The answer to that question is a resounding yes.
PS4 will be using HSA / HUMA. It will be the first known closed system to implement HSA/HUMA from a commercial aspect. Many of us have been fantasizing about the potentials of HSA/HUMA, but now we finally get to see it in action.
HSA / HUMA from AMD:
http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/hsa/Pages/hsa.aspx#3
Source for PS4 having HSA / HUMA and very good break down of HSA / HUMA:
NeoGaf: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=77493461&postcount=1
Just a note though: since the architecture is almost identical for the Xbox, HSA and HUMA may very well potentially get implemented on their side.
Is that all there is to the differences? No absolutely not. (THE TL;DR is at the bottom).
Lets get to the APU.
The APU in question is the AMD Jaguar. A octo-core (probably faux octo-core in where it has 8 integer processing units and 4 floating point processing units). Both systems have a variant of this, the detailed specifics are still missing.
The PS4 GPU inside the APU is different too. It is better, in terms of performance and shader count. Microsoft have already announced a frequency boost to make it "competitive." At this point in the game, my experience tells me they stumbled on performance and are trying to make it up with frequency speed.
There has been a lot of downplay on the PS4's superiority. I call this marketing bullshit.
The PS4 GPU has approximately 1152 Shader Count, or more than like "Stream Processors" utilizing the GCN architecture. The estimated GPU throughput is at 1.84 TFLOPs.
For Comparison's sake, the AMD Radeon HD 7850 (Desktop not Mobile) GPU has 1,024 Steam Processors, and 1.76TFLOPs of performance. The memory bandwidth is 153.6 GB/s. An HD 7870 has 1,280 Stream Processors, and 2.56 TFLOPS, with 153.6 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
That would put the paper/theoretical perforamnce of the PS4 somewhere between an HD 7850 to 7870. There is also the factor of D2M Programming and HUMA. D2M is direct to metal programming, code for specific hardware runs so much better than generic or non-specific code. While the theoretical performance maybe an HD 7860 (not a real card) the actual performance maybe higher and closer to a 7950. Especially with the type of memory it has: 8GB GDDR5 (not sure what speed yet.) This gives it the potential for 176.0 GB/s Memory Bandwidth @ the rumored 5500 MHz.
The Xbox One on the other hand, will have 768 Shader/Steam Processors @ 1.23 TFLOPs, 32MB of eSRAM (rumored to be between 100 GB/s to 200), and 8GB of DDR3 @ 2133~2300 MHz (about 50~65 GB/s) Now memory bandwidth won't really be a limitation to either side this time, and while on paper the Xbox One looks to finesse about the same performance as the PS4, the PS4 will result in the smoother experience (at least at the start.)
Microsoft claims that it has a theoretical output of 192 GB/s but what I calculated was closer to 133 GB/s due to the speed of the slowest component bottle necking performance.
The comparable desktop GPU to the Xbox One's would be between an HD 7770 to a 7790. A moderate downgrade over a theoretical HD 7860 by any standards.
Summary (TL;DR):
The CPU Performance should be on par with each other, in favor of the Xbox One (cloud potential.)
The CPU while important, is not the primary ingredient in driving video games, its the GPU.
PS4 GPU: XBox One GPU:
Processors: 1152 Processors: 768
TFLOPS: 1.84 TFLOPS: 1.23 TFLOPS
Memory: 8GB GDDR5 Memory: 8GB DDR3 w/ 32MB eSRAM
Mem Band: 176.0GB/s Mem Band: 68.3 GB/s w/ 102 GB/s ~ 133GB/s with overhead/bottle neck.
Xbox One CPU has the potential for 3 VMs per machine providing CPU performance.
I honestly can't see how this will help video games specifically though, but cool none the less.
PS4 will use HSA/HUMA, very cool.
PS4 GPU Processors has 50% more processors.
PS4 TFLOPS is about 49.59% higher.
Equal capacity in memory.
Memory Bandwidth (should be good enough for both systems.)
Potentially equal bandwidth on memory or more according to Microsoft (+9%)
By my calculations/estimate the PS4 has 32.33% more bandwidth.
PS4 HDD can be replaced by end-users (SSD here I come!)
While, both systems should be bought based off the games you wish to play (i.e. exclusives :( ), there shouldn't be any question to which has the beefier hardware. The PS4 has roughly 50% more raw GPU power than the Xbox One.
Eurogamer.net did a very detailed breakdown as well!
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-can-xbox-one-multi-platform-games-compete-with-ps4
UPDATE:
I have followed the fiasco today with PCPER vs. VRZONE.
PCPER thought they debunked it: http://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/Sony-PlayStation-4-PS4-will-NOT-utilize-AMD-hUMA-Kabini-based-SoC?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
VRZONE has confirmed HSA: http://vr-zone.com/articles/xbox-dev-xbox-one-answer-ps4s-huma-technology/52662.html#ixzz2cjmZ3miR
AMD's current stance seems to be they can't confirm nor deny now, although they were the original source of the confusion.
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