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Scorpio

Microsoft finally announced some of the specifics of its upcoming Project Scorpio refresh, and the implications for the Xbox One product line are enormous. This isn't only a refresh or a doubling-up of existing resources, like Sony used with the PS4 Pro. This is something altogether different, and Microsoft doesn't seem to exist merely gunning for the PS4 — it'south taking on the PC market as well.

Projection Scorpio tech specs

Projection Scorpio will feature 40 'customized' Radeon compute units (2,560 cores, presumably) clocked at 1172MHz. The clock speed boost alone is ane.37x college than the Xbox One, while the GPU's core count has increased by 3.33x.

XboxScorpioSoC

The new Project Scorpio SoC, congenital on TSMC'south 16nm FinFET proces. Image by Digital Foundry

Data from Digital Foundry strongly suggests Scorpio is based on Polaris, not Vega. L2 enshroud is said to have quadrupled, from 512KB to 2MB, which would match the RX 470 and RX 480 configurations. Microsoft is said to have doubled the number of return backends on the bit from 16 (Xbox One) to 32 (Scorpio), which again fits the Polaris architecture. Scorpio is really slightly larger than RX 480, at 2560 cores as opposed to 2304 cores. That's an 1.11x increase in GPU cores and a seven.5% decrease in GPU frequency compared with AMD's PC variant. Microsoft claims a 2.7x increase in GPU fill-rate — more than than enough for 4K gaming (according to MS).

RX480-Technology

The RX 480 looks like the closest analog to the GPU inside Project Scorpio. Near of the features line upwards, apart from obvious differences similar xl CUs instead of 36.

Memory bandwidth besides gets a huge kick upwardly. The Xbox One was criticized for its decision to rely on cheaper DDR3 rather than going the unified GDDR5 road Sony chose. Scorpio will use GDDR5, and it offers 12GB of memory, up from 8GB. That 12GB of RAM is accessed via a series of 32-flake memory buses, for a total of 326GB/s of retentivity bandwidth. That'southward nearly 5x the DRAM bandwidth of the Xbox One, not counting the 32MB of enshroud. It's also on par with what the GTX 1080 offers.

A quote from Digital Foundry suggests Microsoft has washed some significant piece of work customizing its GPU forepart terminate. From the article:

the near exciting aspect surrounding the CPU revamp doesn't really relate to the processor blocks at all, simply rather to the GPU command processor – the piece of hardware that receives instructions from the CPU, piping them through to the graphics core.

"Nosotros essentially moved Direct3D 12," says Goossen. "Nosotros built that into the command processor of the GPU and what that means is that, for all the loftier frequency API invocations that the games do, they'll all natively implemented in the logic of the command processor – and what this means is that our advice from the game to the GPU is super-efficient."

Processing draw calls – effectively telling the graphics hardware what to draw – is one of the about important tasks the CPU carries out. It can suck up a lot of processor resource, a pipeline that traditionally takes thousands – mayhap hundreds of thousands – of CPU instructions. With Scorpio'south hardware offload, any draw call tin exist executed with merely 11 instructions, and but 9 for a state alter.

"It's a massive win for us and for the developers who've adopted D3D12 on Xbox, they've told us they've been able to cutting their CPU rendering overhead by one-half, which is pretty amazing because now the driver portion of that is such a tiny fraction," adds Goossen.

These changes seem to further signal to a vastly more than powerful panel than anything Microsoft has previously shipped, only what most the CPU?

As for Scorpio'south CPU, Microsoft isn't revealing all its secrets just yet. The chip is now clocked at 2.3GHz (up from 1.73GHz), but it's non a Ryzen processor. Microsoft is just saying that it's heavily customized the core to noticeably ameliorate its overall performance. Nosotros've speculated earlier most how MS might accomplish that — Jaguar definitely had some depression-hanging fruit, including its one-half-speed L2 enshroud and relatively slow memory controller. Just addressing those bug would speed the CPU upwardly quite a chip. 1 thing Microsoft didn't do, notwithstanding, was move to a unified eight-core solution.

Eurogamer notes that some of the customizations to Scorpio include latency reductions and improved CPU/GPU coherency, all of which should improve performance, even autonomously from clock speed improvements.

Cooling design

Even on a 16nm process node from TSMC, this much firepower is going to generate a lot of rut — but Microsoft has borrowed a trick from the PC industry to keep its console cool. Scorpio volition use a vapor sleeping accommodation heat sink to help motion oestrus out of the APU and into the estrus sink. Instead of a mutual axial fan, Scorpio uses a centrifugal fan that "kind of looks like a supercharger on a car."

VaporChamber

Project Scorpio's vapor bedchamber. Image by Digital Foundry

Microsoft includes an internal ability supply for Scorpio rated at 245W. AMD may have benefited from improved procedure node pattern at TSMC, since the RX 480 alone would've accounted for near of that power supply's rated output.

Decision-ish

We've got more to say about Scorpio and its power to return in 4K, backwards compatibility, and another aspects of the design, merely the base tech specs give united states of america more than than plenty meat to chew on for 1 article.

Barring calamitous issues, Microsoft has congenital a console that should hands outperform Sony'southward PS4 Pro. The new Scorpio is faster, its GPU is larger, and it can dedicate a full 8GB of RAM to gaming, with 4GB reserved for the Os. Junking the 32MB RAM cache in favor of relying on GDDR5 should also make information technology easier for developers to target the platform.

449811-project-scorpio

Digital Foundry saw Scorpio running Forza 6 Apex at a speed and fluidity they've merely seen matched by the GTX 1080 on a PC. I'thousand not suggesting anyone treat that single metric equally proof the Xbox Scorpio is every bit powerful every bit Nvidia's second-most powerful GPU, but it's a very impressive showing for a console that hasn't even launched still. Iv years after launch, Xbox I sales nevertheless trail Sony by a well-nigh 2:i margin. There's a skillful reason for that — the Xbox 1 is significantly less powerful than Sony's console, and it nearly ever loses to its rival in terms of visual fidelity or performance when the ii are compared.

Scorpio is set to change all that — and Eurogamer thinks it'll debut at just $499.

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