Marc Whitten, corporate vice president of Xbox Live, speaks about the technology behind Microsoft's Xbox One during a press event in Redmond

Microsoft is starting to getting a clearer picture of what its upcoming console can really do, according to Xbox One Chief Product Officer Marc Whitten. Making an appearance on Major Nelson Radio – Larry Hryb’s Microsoft-centric weekly podcast – Whitten revealed, “We’ve tweaked up our clock speed on the GPU from 800 Mhz to 853 Mhz.”

The bump in processing speed, first reported by Eurogamer, isn’t a last-minute dash to squeeze in more power at the eleventh hour, but rather a move to fine tune the hardware based on initial estimates. “This is the time where we’ve gone from the theory of how the hardware works – you know, what do we think the yield is going to look like, what is the thermal envelope, how do things come together – to really having them in our hands,” Whitten explained. “That’s the time where you start tweaking the knobs, because either your theory was dead-on, or you were a little too conservative or you were a little too aggressive.”

The Xbox One is still undergoing internal beta, receiving almost daily builds in the final months before launch. As Whitten states, “It’s just an example where we really get close to the final performance envelope of how the box works and really making sure we have a great product for our developers to build great games against.”

Source: Eurogamer, MNR