For recap purposes, Xbox One’s Memory Management Unit features three memory units that go through three different places and perform three different tasks, working independently of each other. The first two memory units are divided into coherent and non-coherent DRAMs which accesses CPU Cache Coherence at 30GB/sec and Non-CPU Cache Coherence at 68GB/sec. For those who are unaware, coherency is the behavior of reads and writes to the same memory location, which resolves the issue of inconsistent data due to cache.
The last type of memory is the eSRAM which is divided into 4 blocks of 8MB, having a bandwidth of 204GB/sec. However the eSRAM, unlike DRAM has much lower latency. With the basic introduction out of the way let us focus on what this article is about. Microsoft may be improving the performance of the Xbox One’s DRAM according to a new job listing posted on the company’s official careers page under the Xbox Gaming division.
The company is looking for a Console Memory Validation Engineer who will take care of “the development, test and qualification of DRAM memory products functioning within Microsoft products.” Furthermore the candidate will need to “evaluate different solution options for performance, functionality, stability, cost and risk for the memory subsystem within the platform.”
The candidate should have prior experience in “debugging, validating and bringing up DRAM memory subsystems.” Recently, Microsoft also unlocked an extra CPU core on the Xbox One so it’s intriguing to see Microsoft pushing to optimize the Xbox One’s performance even further. During the last quarter of 2014, the performance gap between the PS4 and Xbox One did seemed to narrow down. Will Microsoft narrow down the gap even further in 2015? This is something that remains to be seen.