Xbox One to ship on Nov. 22

Microsoft’s Xbox One will become available on Nov. 22 and the company has made the game console faster by cranking up the clock speeds of the CPU and graphics processor.

The console is priced at US$499 and will be available in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Mexico, France, Germany, Austria, Ireland, Italy and Spain. The console will ship in more markets next year.

Microsoft is already taking pre-orders for the console. Best Buy will open some U.S. retail stores at midnight so buyers can pick up consoles they have pre-ordered.

Microsoft has also managed to speed up the game console. In a blog entry, the company said the CPU speed has been increased by 10 percent, from 1.6GHz to 1.75GHz. The graphics processor clock speed has also been increased by 6 percent. Advanced Micro Devices makes the processors.

“What does this mean to you the gamer? It means that the Xbox One will have that much more power for developers to make their games and entertainment really shine,” said Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of marketing, strategy and business at Xbox, in the blog entry.

The Xbox One will be available with the Kinect, which will be able to detect motion from up to six players in a living room, using rays of light. There are also improvements to the Xbox controller and to the cloud gaming service, which is delivered by over 300,000 servers.

The Xbox One will compete with Sony’s PlayStation 4, which ships on Nov. 15 for $399.