Microsoft prepares new black Xbox Series S

Microsoft has announced the launch of a new black Xbox Series S console, slated for release on September 1st this year.

Apart from the color alteration, Microsoft has augmented storage from the original 512GB to 1TB, equivalent to that of the Xbox Series X. Accompanying the storage upgrade, the price tag of the black Xbox Series S has likewise been elevated to $349, $50 more expensive than its predecessor.

Of late, Microsoft appears to be addressing one of the major impediments of the Xbox Series X/S consoles, namely the limited storage space coupled with exorbitant pricing. In comparison to its rival Sony’s PlayStation 5, which uses a direct PCIe 4.0 SSD, Microsoft requires the use of a dedicated storage expansion card inserted into a corresponding external interface, considerably pricier. To date, only Seagate and Western Digital have released dedicated storage expansion card products.

The Xbox Series S is equipped with an AMD custom chip, manufactured using TSMC’s 7nm process, featuring an 8-core, 16-thread Zen 2 architecture CPU with a frequency of 3.6 GHz. It also adopts an RDNA 2 architecture GPU with 20 CUs, a frequency of 1.565 GHz, and is paired with 10GB of GDDR6 memory. The built-in PCIe 4.0 SSD capacity is either 512GB or 1TB, and supports HDMI 2.1 output. As a next-generation home console, the Xbox Series S supports an array of novel features, including hardware-accelerated ray tracing, DirectML machine learning, VRS variable-rate shading, variable refresh rate, and backward compatibility.

Although the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X adopt congruent architectures, the specific specifications and configurations cause a notable performance gap between the two, with the former approximately equating to a third of the latter’s performance. The positioning of the two consoles also differs, with the Xbox Series S targeting 2K@60 FPS game performance, with an upper limit of 120 FPS.