Xbox Scorpio specs officially revealed
Find out more about the technical details of the more powerful Xbox One, Project Scorpio.
As promised, Microsoft has revealed the technical specs for Project Scorpio through Digital Foundry.
The site published a tech breakdown of the console's hardware specs, alongside a first look some of the chip and cooling designs inside the console. In the video above, Digital Foundry goes through the full list of hardware specs and provides some details about each of them.
Six-teraflops is the figure Microsoft announced at E3 last year, and according to the site, the console does hit it. Here are the specs:
CPU – Eight custom x86 cores clocked at 2.3GHz
GPU – 40 customised compute units at 1172MHz
Memory – 12GB GDDR5
Memory Bandwidth – 326GB/s
Hard Drive – 1TB 2.5-inch
Optical Drive – 4K UHD Blu-ray
Scorpio uses a custom, upgraded version of AMD's Jaguar CPU tech, the same one found in the original Xbox One as well as PS4, and PS4 Pro. It's clocked at 2.3GHz, higher than PS4 Pro's 2.1GHz and Xbox One's 1.75GHz, though it retains the 4MB L2 Cache.
The GPU, partially based on a Polaris chip, sports 40 compute units, as opposed to PS4 Pro's 36. More importantly, they have a clock speed of 1172MHz, much higher than the 911MHz the PS4 Pro delivers. The site estimates this to result in 43% advantage in compute power.
Memory bandwidth is 326GB/s from the 12GB of GDDR5 RAM on board. The console does not use GDDR5X as some predicted. 8GB of that memory will be available for use in games, as opposed to 5GB for PS4 Pro.
The analysis notes that all the pieces have been further customised by Microsoft, taking them beyond their off-the-shelf PC parts status. Microsoft reportedly “profiled” existing Xbox One games to identify bottleneck in order to avoid them when making Scorpio. The company said that over 60 customisations were made to the GPU pipeline to eliminate areas that negatively affected games' performance in the past.
As for cooling, it'll be based on a vapour chamber design, similar to the one used on the GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti. This means that heat will be entirely pushed out through the back, with no air vents on top of the console.
Microsoft also promised that existing Xbox One and Xbox 360 games can benefit from the increased power, though it's up to publishers if and how they use this power. The console is effectively the most powerful ever, as you can clearly glean from the report.
