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It’s been over a year and a half since the Xbox One and PS4 first debuted here in the U.S. In that time, they’ve both earned their keep as the bearer of current-generation game consoles. Microsoft realized some months after release that it needed a $400, price-competitive version with the PS4 that lacked the Kinect camera, and has since remedied what was once a bit of a lopsided, apples-and-oranges comparison.

Since then, both the Xbox One and PS4 have sold pretty well, with the edge on Sony’s side — although January’s $50 price cut for the Kinect-less Xbox One is helping Microsoft catch up. That said, how do they directly compare with each other in 2015? If you’re thinking about buying one of these two consoles–or just want ammunition for bragging rights–here’s what you need to know.

One note before we get started: Unlike all previous console generations, the PS4 and Xbox One are almost identical hardware-wise. With an x86 AMD APU at the heart of each, the Sony and Microsoft consoles are essentially PCs — and their hardware specs, and thus relative performance, can be compared in the same way you would compare two x86-based laptops or ARM-based Android tablets. Read on for our Xbox One-versus-PS4 hardware specs comparison.

PS4 vs. Xbox One: CPUs compared

For the PS4 and Xbox One, Microsoft and Sony both opted for a semi-custom AMD APU — a 28nm part fabricated by TSMC that features an eight-core Jaguar CPU, paired with a Radeon 7000-series GPU. (We’ll discuss the GPU in the next section.) The PS4 and Xbox One CPU is virtually identical, except the Xbox One is clocked at 1.75GHz, while the PS4 is at 1.6GHz.

The Jaguar CPU core itself isn’t particularly exciting. In PCs, Jaguar is used in AMD’s Kabini and Temash parts, which were aimed at laptops and tablets respectively. If you’re looking for a tangible comparison, CPUs based on the Jaguar core are roughly comparable to Intel’s Bay Trail Atom. With eight cores (as opposed to two or four in a regular Kabini-Temash setup), both the PS4 and Xbox One will have quite a lot of CPU power on tap. The large core count allows both consoles to excel at multitasking — important for modern living room and media center use cases, and doubly so for the Xbox One, which runs two different operating systems side-by-side. Ultimately, though, despite the Xbox One having a slightly faster CPU, it makes little difference to either console’s relative games performance.

PS4 vs. Xbox One: GPUs compared

Again, by virtue of being an AMD APU, the Xbox One and PS4 GPUs are technologically very similar — with the simple difference that the PS4 GPU is larger. In PC terms, the Xbox One has a GPU that’s similar to the entry-level Bonaire GPU in the older Radeon HD 7790, while the PS4 is outfitted with the midrange Pitcairn that can be found in the HD 7870. In numerical terms, the Xbox One GPU has 12 compute units (768 shader processors), while the PS4 has 18 CUs (1152 shaders). The Xbox One is slightly ahead on GPU clock speed (853MHz vs. 800MHz for the PS4).

Source: www.extremetech.com