Microsoft: Comparing Xbox One and PS4 Technology is ‘Meaningless’

People will always put the latest pieces of gaming hardware side by side in order to discover which has the more horsepower. Even if it turns out to be difficult to differentiate the nuances with the naked eye, both manufacturers and consumers seem to take a certain amount of pride in saying their next-generation machine is the most powerful. 

That hasn’t been as much of the case with the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One, but Xbox product planning boss Albert Penello believes that any comparisons Sony has made up to this point are “meaningless.”

"The problem is that Sony decided to go out and publish a bunch of numbers, which are in some ways meaningless," he told OXM in a recent interview. "Because this isn't like 1990, when it was 16-bit versus 32-bit.”

Microsoft has been through this scenario before. The PlayStation 3 was touted as a technologically superior machine all throughout our current console cycle, but in the end, it’s the quality of the games and services that shines through.

"For me, I'd rather not even have the conversation, because it's not going to matter," Penello continued. "The box is going to be awesome. The games are going to be awesome. I heard this exact same argument last generation and it's a pointless argument, because people are debating things which they don't know about. They're not [head silicon engineer] Nick Baker or [corporate vice president of IEB hardware Todd Holmdahl], and I'm not [lead PS4 architect] Mark Cerny, so why are we having this discussion?"

We really won’t know if it will make a difference until both the PS4 and Xbox One launch later this year.