Last month, Microsoft announced that the Xbox One's GPU would be getting a slight clock speed bump, and now it sounds like the CPU is getting some of the same love. Polygon reports that the console's AMD-produced CPU cores will run at 1.75GHz in the shipping version of the console instead of the 1.6GHz that they've run at in development kits so far. Microsoft VP of marketing and strategy Yusuf Mehdi mentioned the clock speed increase at the Citi Global Financial Conference today and reaffirmed Microsoft's intent to release the console in November (though he declined to be more specific).

"We'll announce a launch date shortly," said Mehdi. "We recently just went into full production, so we're now producing en masse Xbox One consoles. We've had real good progress on the system. In fact, we just updated the CPU performance to 1.75 GHz on top of the graphics performance improvement, so the system is really going to shine [and] the games look pretty incredible."

Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 use eight-core CPUs based on AMD's "Jaguar" architecture—in PCs, Jaguar is intended to be AMD's low-cost, low-power CPU architecture, which makes it a decent fit for a more GPU-centric device like a game console. We have yet to see a reliable source comment on the PlayStation 4's CPU clock speed, which makes it difficult to say how the two consoles' relative CPU performance stacks up.

Other information about the Xbox One has continued to trickle out from Microsoft as its eventual (as-yet-unknown) launch date draws nearer: the software won't initially support external storage, for example, and the console's beefy cooling system was apparently designed to last for its entire projected 10-year lifespan. The Xbox One will also now include a headset, a reversal of a position that Microsoft took earlier in the summer.