Albert Penello is the Director of Product Planning for Microsoft’s Xbox One. Recently, he’s had a big presence on a popular gaming forum called NeoGAF. Penello has been vocal about the power of the Xbox One, shooting down claims that the PlayStation 4 is more powerful than their new hardware. These claims by Penello made many assume that the full story behind the Xbox One hardware had yet to be told. One of the rumors was that Microsoft would eventually reveal a second GPU in the Xbox One. Just recently, Penello recently rejected these claims.
What followed is a lengthy conversation that gives some insight into why Penello stands by his claims that the Xbox One is as powerful as the PS4.
“When I first started coming on, I said what I wanted to do was speak more directly and more honestly with the community, clarifying what we could because you guys have more detailed questions then we had been dealing with. Regarding the power, I’ve tried to explain areas that are misunderstood and provide insight from the actual engineers on the system.”
“I’ve spent several hours over the last few weeks with the Technical Fellow working on our graphics engines. He was also one of the guys that worked most closely with the silicon team developing the actual architecture of our machine, and knows how and why it works better than anyone,” said Penello. “So while I appreciate the technical acumen of folks on this board – you should know that every single thing I posted, I reviewed with him for accuracy. I wanted to make sure I was stating things factually, and accurately. So if you’re saying you can’t add bandwidth – you can. If you want to dispute that ESRAM has simultaneous read/write cycles – it does. I know this forum demands accuracy, which is why I fact checked my points with a guy who helped design the machine…. This is the same guy, by the way, that jumps on a plane when developers want more detail and hands-on review of code and how to extract the maximum performance from our box. He has heard first-hand from developers exactly how our boxes compare, which has only proven our belief that they are nearly the same in real-world situations. If he wasn’t coming back smiling, I certainly wouldn’t be so bullish dismissing these claims.”
Penello has since stopped fielding questions on the Xbox One, claiming that he might be doing more harm than good. He promises for more details in the future, from engineers who are working on the system.
- This article was updated on February 19th, 2018
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