Microsoft unveils official Xbox One Project Scorpio specifications

April 7, 2017 | 10:39

Tags: #esram #jaguar #playstation-4-pro #project-scorpio #ps4-pro #xbox-one #xbox-one-s

Companies: #amd #microsoft

Microsoft has officially unveiled the specifications of its upcoming Project Scorpio mid-life Xbox One upgrade, and it's clear the company has worked hard to make sure it boxes rival Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro into a corner.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Microsoft revealed that Project Scorpio is effectively a ground-up rethink with a view to supporting native Ultra HD resolutions in future games. Where the original Xbox One had eight AMD Jaguar processing cores running at 1.75GHz, the Project Scorpio hardware features what the company describes as 'custom x86 cores' - though still very much AMD hardware - running at 2.3GHz. The graphics hardware, too, has been considerably boosted: 12 Graphics Core Next (GCN) compute units running at 853MHz on the Xbox One and 914MHz on the Xbox One S redesign have been replaced with 40 'customised compute units' - again, still very much AMD-based - running at 1,172MHz. Even the memory has been upgraded, going from 8GB of DDR3 with a 32MB ESRAM chunk developers never really knew how to harness to 12GB of GDDR5.

Putting those up against Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro, it's clear that Microsoft has been using its extra time since the unveiling to make sure it beats its rival on every possible aspect: 2.3GHz processor cores to 2.1GHz, 40 1,172MHz graphics compute units to 36 911MHz compute units, 12GB of GDDR5 with 326GB/s throughput to 8GB with 218GB/s, and there's even an Ultra HD-ready Blu-ray drive in place.

Sadly, there are still a few key facts Microsoft isn't yet sharing. Chief among these is pricing: While the Project Scorpio refresh offers considerably higher specifications than Sony's PS4 Pro, Microsoft is going to have to be careful to ensure it doesn't come with a correspondingly sky-high price tag.
Discuss this in the forums

Posted by Corky42 - Fri Apr 07 2017 09:54

I'm going to throw my hat in the ring and guess it will cost $499.

Posted by rollo - Fri Apr 07 2017 16:31

Anything under £499 is a bonus

Posted by Wakka - Fri Apr 07 2017 17:30

So PS4 Pro and Scorpio (along with PS4 Vanilla and Xbox One) have 8 core CPU's... So is it the developers fault that games barely make use of more than 4 cores? Or Intel for locking us down to 4 cores in the mainstream segment since 2010?

Posted by rollo - Fri Apr 07 2017 20:23

Not the same, cannot compare a cpu to a SOC which is what people do not get.

PS3 effectively had 10 cpu cores, does not mean that it affects pc users.

Console games rarely set the performance barriers outside of the ports we get.

Pc would need games designed to thread through all cores, which would have to be probably done from the ground up. Strategy games would benefit best by this.
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