Report: Next-generation Microsoft and Sony consoles to contain 8-core AMD Jaguar processors

After a number of rumours last week surrounding Microsoft's and Sony's chosen hardware for their next-generation game consoles, a new report from Eurogamer's Digital Foundry states that both machines will contain AMD Jaguar processors.

This would make these machines more powerful than anything currently available in the home PC market.

Clocked at around 1.6GHz each, AMD's low power, low cost cores are expected to be built onto highly-integrated "system-on-chips". But being so cheap and cool they could be built in eight-core configurations. Only quad-core versions are set to ship for the PC market later this year.

Despite having the processors in common, there are still expected to be crucial differences between Sony's machine, thought to be codenamed "Orbis", and Microsoft's "Durango".

Sony's console is expected to include Radeon HD graphics hardware that will, according to Digital Foundry, be a bespoke spin on the company's existing AMD Radeon 7970M GPU. Offering 850MHz speed and 20 "Graphics Core Next" compute units, Orbis is said to offer only 18 compute units and run at 800MHz. Despite this, the GPU is still thought to offer up an impressive 1.84 teraflops metric.

Digital Foundry's report does not shed any light on Microsoft's choice of GPU. Rumours over the past year have linked the Durango hardware with both AMD and Nvidia chipsets, however.

As for RAM, the heavily-rumoured consensus, which Digital Foundry's source seems to agree with, is that Orbis will feature 4GB of on-board DDR5 memory, while Durango will come with 8GB of DDR3, as well as a high-speed eDRAM buffer for the unnamed GPU. 3GB alone will apparently be set aside specially for the operating system.

Such high RAM requirements might point to a Windows 8-based platform, the 64-bit edition of which requires 2GB to run, 3GB leading to a much smoother session.