EA exec says Xbox One/PS4 are a generation ahead of top-spec PCs

EA executive vice president and chief technical officer Rajat Teneja has said that the architectures of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are "a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market."

Writing in a post on social media service LinkedIn, the former Microsoft employee said the next-gen hardware of both Sony and Microsoft is "a significant inflection point in the history of our industry" that will be "as profound as the introduction of smartphones or Facebook to the market."

"Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have adopted electronics and an integrated systems-on-a -chip (soc) architecture that unleashes magnitudes more compute and graphics power than the current generation of consoles," says Teneja. "These architectures are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market and their unique design of the hardware, the underlying operating system and the live service layer create one of the most compelling platforms to reimagine game mechanics."

The importance of the cloud will also tie in to the future of games, according to Teneja. "The power of connected data is going to be an integral part of the gaming experience," he said. "We see 2.5bn monthly game sessions and 50 [terabytes] of daily telemetry data on our network alone. The Xbox Live network required 500 servers when it launched a decade ago and as was mentioned yesterday, they are now provisioning 300,000 servers to handle Xbox data in the cloud. That growth is staggering, but it also means we'll really start to see more examples of true cross-device play."

"You don't have to be an engineer or even a gamer like me to appreciate the power of these new devices," he concluded.

EA this week announced that its new, next-gen Ignite engine will power its upcoming sports titles. DICE's Frostbite engine will also play a key part in EA's next-gen development.

Microsoft announced the Xbox One earlier this week. Check out GameSpot's Xbox One hub for more information on the successor to the Xbox 360