The amount of ignorance on here is shocking.
The Series S was designed for a reason: to present a next gen gaming experience targeting 1080P/1440P 60/120 FPS.
The tech and hardware inside is nearly identical to Series X with major differences being less ram and less gpu power. You don’t need 12TF of graphical power to achieve what the Series S is targeting. Go find me a comparable PC build for $299. You can’t. It doesn’t exist.
The engineers at Microsoft aren’t morons.
Nobody said they were morons, most of those engineers designed the Xbox One too and PS3 engineers were not morons either.
We also all know the marketing PR (your post is copy-pasted from the one you made in another thread, also quoting the condensed PR line about what the box is sold as) aside from the fact that the 1080p or less target is revisionist history and that the same exact version at a lower resolution (and with just slightly lower resolution textures perhaps) implies there would not be other graphical differences and so far it is not clearly always the case. MS either talked about 1440p with no compromises or was very generic about the resolution differences, they never called it out as 1080p or less. None of the consoles out there are the 100% 60 FPS Native 4K machines PR winked and smiled at to be fair yeah although some are closer to that.
Differences are: lower clocked CPU (in SMT mode it goes below PS5 too), lower clocked GPU which also has less CU’s (having less CU’s is one thing, but the lower clocked affects other components shared* on the GPU outside of the CU’s, assuming it has two Shader Engines and thus 4 Shader Arrays like XSX else it would have even less ROP’s, Primitive Units, and Rasteriser units), considerable less RAM and reduced bandwidth (especially on the non GPU optimised region which could be an added bottleneck), and half the SSD.
XSX has 26 active (28 total) DCU’s split across 2 Shader Engines and with two Shader Arrays per Shader Engine: 7 DCU per Shader Array.
XSS has 10 Active DCU’s (not sure how many total, let’s assume 12 or more easily 14). This leads me to think they cut the XSX GPU in half and reduced the clock. It sounds easier to customise it that way than changing the amount of DCU’s per ShaderArray (it would be 4 DCU’s per Shader Array... but then again I have not see a die shot of the XSS, it could be the same chip downclocked and with lots of HW disabled, it would seem very expensive though unless yields were atrocious and thus the XSX would be a giant loss leader). You can see the amount of non CU resources that get cut that affect fill rate and geometry processing if we went from 4 Shader Arrays and 2 Shader Engines to 2 Shader Arrays and 1 Shader Engine.
*See RDNA high level diagram here for common parts outside of the single DCU’s (2 CU’s fused into one like AMD’s Bulldozer CPU):
