In what seems to be unprecedented move by Microsoft, the company has officially revealed the final specifications for its upcoming Xbox variant codenamed Project Scorpio well ahead of its release later this year. As you might know, Microsoft has set rather high target for the console including native 4K gameplay at 60fps, and support for virtual reality when it was first officially teased at E3 2016.
At the same event, Microsoft stated that both experiences will be delivered through a GPU that able to deliver 6TFLOPS of computing power alongside an 8-core CPU, and 320GB/s of memory bandwidth. These all seems very ambitious but nevertheless, it seems that Microsoft has managed or at least getting really close to its Project Scorpio targets according to the insights provided by the company to Digital Foundry.
For those who expecting Microsoft to adopt the new Ryzen processor in Project Scorpio, unfortunately that didn’t happen. Referred to as the Scorpio Engine, the new custom System-on-Chip (SoC) which was designed by AMD is still using Jaguar cores as per SoCs in Xbox One as well as Sony PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro.
Nevertheless, the Scorpio Engine is still much more advanced than the SoCs in those consoles especially with its 2.3GHz 8-core CPU together with 1172MHz GPU with 40 custom Radeon compute units, and 12GB GDDR5. At the same time, the final version of Project Scorpio will have memory bandwidth of 326GB/s which is slightly higher that Microsoft’s original target.
In order to cope with the heat produced by Scorpio Engine, Microsoft has implemented a vapour chamber heat sink that works in hand with a custom designed centrifugal fan. Alongside its 245W internal power supply, the console will also come standard with a 2.5-inch 1TB hard drive and 4K Blu-Ray drive.
With so much power underneath the console, it is not surprising that Microsoft has dubbed its Project Scoprio as the world’s most powerful console. That being said though, we still eager to knows its actual name, look, and price as well as real life performance which apparently will be revealed at E3 2017 later this year.
(Source: Digital Foundry @ Eurogamer)
