Microsoft Upgrades Xbox One Hardware Once Again

It is coming down to the wire for both Sony and Microsoft. Final preparations for both their next-gen consoles are being made as production of the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 are being prepped and ready to go forward. That is why it seems odd to hear, through Geekwire, that Microsoft has just recently upgraded the Xbox One CPU performance to 1.75 GHz from 1.6 GHz. You can hear it for yourself on this conference call audio file, around the 1:45 mark.

Xbox chief marketing officer Yusef Mehdi revealed this new information, saying that Microsoft is in full production of their Xbox One console, with a November 2013 launch still in mind. “This will be the biggest launch we’ve ever done by a wide margin in terms of units shipped at launch,” Mehdi said at the conference.

This isn’t the first time that the Xbox One’s hardware has been upgraded. About a month ago, Xbox chief product officer Marc Whitten went on Major Nelson’s podcast to proclaim that the Xbox One received a GPU upgrade from 800 MHz to 853 MHz.

Hardware changes are common for console planning in the months leading up to full production. However, Microsoft had a terrible time when they made last-minute hardware tweaks leading up to the Xbox 360 console release in 2005. The Red Ring of Death that afflicted many launch window consoles cost the gaming division hundreds of millions of dollars, that which they only made back in the second half of the console’s lifetime. For their sake, hopefully Microsoft doesn’t run into those same problems again this time around.

The Xbox One will launch in North America this November.