In a move that clearly signals Microsoft’s desperation to get ahead of Sony’s PlayStation 4 by any means possible, the Xbox One’s CPU has been speed boosted from 1.6GHz to 1.75GHz — 150MHz, or just under 10%. At the same press conference, Microsoft also said that the Xbox One has entered mass production, and that it’s on schedule for a November release — though we still don’t have an exact release date. (Updated: November 22 now seems likely.) If you’re a core gamer — the demographic that console makers primarily target — the speed bump sounds like you’re getting some extra performance for free. In reality, this is just marketing swill; the PS4, by virtue of its much beefier GPU, will still be much more powerful than the Xbox One — on paper, anyway.

Inside both the PS4 and Xbox One is an AMD Jaguar-based CPU and a Southern Islands-based GPU. Originally, the Xbox One CPU was clocked at 1.6GHz, while the GPU was clocked at 800MHz. Last month the GPU was bumped to 853MHz (an increase of around 7%), and now the CPU has boosted to 1.75GHz. This might sound like you’re getting an extra 5-10% performance for free, but it’s important to remember that Microsoft isn’t magically pushing the envelope on these cores: AMD regularly ships Jaguar-based parts at 2GHz, and the Radeon 7790 (which is most similar to the Xbox One’s GPU) ships with a core clock of 1000MHz. The fact of the matter is that the Xbox One’s cores are underclocked, probably to reduce power consumption, and thus heat and noise generation. Microsoft could happily bump both cores up another 10% and still be within the operational envelope — the console would just be a bit noisier.

While a free speed boost is of course nice, this isn’t going to make up the massive performance lead granted by the PS4’s GPU, which has 50% more compute units (cores), and thus 50% higher theoretical peak performance. It is worth noting that we still don’t know the clock speed of either the CPU or GPU in the PS4, though. So far we have assumed that they will be comparable to the Xbox One — but if they’re 10 or 20% lower, then the performance gap between the two consoles will be fairly small. Ultimately, as we’ve already reported numerous times, the real-world difference between the consoles is likely to be very, very small, except perhaps in console exclusives where developers program the games to make good use of console-specific architectural differences.

In other news, Microsoft says the Xbox One has entered mass production, for release in November. We don’t have an exact release date, and eight unlucky countries will still have to wait for a 2014 release. Presumably Microsoft will try to beat the PS4 (which releases on November 15 in the US and November 29 in Europe), but hasn’t been able to fix a specific date thanks to all of the very late changes to the console.

Now read: Analyzing the Xbox One’s graphics capabilities, odd SoC architecture, and bus bandwidth