"The box will pop on and come to your home page or wherever you were last. In order to do that in an efficient way, you have to architect all of that into the box up front. A lot of it is in the SoC," Holmdahl says. That SoC contains both the CPU and GPU, as well as embedded ESRAM; the first two components are based on an AMD design, and custom-built into an SoC with embedded ESRAM. That CPU is based on the Jaguar design from AMD, with eight cores and a 4MB L2 cache, while the GPU is of the D3D11.1 (with extensions) variety, Baker told us.
The console runs in multiple power states, which means it runs in a low-wattage setting when not in use. (Microsoft wouldn't give us specifics other than to say, "The system is designed for an SoC up to about 100W, but will vary on the scenario."
