Microsoft has announced its future plans to induce the Xbox One with steroids. Dubbed as “Project Scorpio”, Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox One variant is said to be packed with cutting edge hardware that’ll make it “the most powerful console ever built” – according to Phil Spencer, Head of Microsoft’s Xbox division.
Microsoft claims that Project Scorpio will be able to run games at a native resolution of 4K. That’s right, soon, console gamers will get to experience the magical realm of 4K gaming – something that PC gamers have been enjoying for a number of years now. That aside, the “enhanced” Xbox One variant will also support VR content; which could mean that this console will be able to power VR headsets like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, maybe.
Speaking of which, all of this cannot be achieved without a powerful graphics processor. The graphics processor included inside Project Scorpio is said to be packed with eight CPU cores, 320GBps of memory bandwidth, as well as 6 TFLOPs of shader throughput. When compared against its predecessor, Project Scorpio completely dwarfs the specifications of the current generation Xbox One console.
We're proud that @Microsoft has expanded their @Xbox One family with 2 new consoles featuring AMD’s semi-custom SoCs https://t.co/tYi6enSgW4
— AMD (@AMD) June 13, 2016
All of this will be powered by AMD’s upcoming semi-custom SoC. Knowing that Project Scorpio will come with a memory bandwidth of 320GBps means that the console could either be powered by a much more powerful Jaguar SoC or the unreleased Zen processor by AMD.
Unfortunately, no other information is known about Microsoft’s Project Scorpio aside from its 2017 release date timeline.
(Source: AnandTech, The Verge, Ars Technica)
