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posted by Fnord666 on Friday April 07 2017, @08:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the does-it-VR dept.

There are some new details about Microsoft's mid-cycle refresh of the Xbox One gaming console. Sony's comparable console is the PlayStation 4 Pro.

The new console seems to be using eight of the same AMD Jaguar cores as the original Xbox One, but the clock speed has been increased by about 31%, from 1.75 GHz to 2.3 GHz. Microsoft has passed on the chance to use AMD's new Zen cores, which were only recently released for desktop users.

The big gains are in the new GPU, which may be AMD Polaris or Vega-based. Peak shader throughput increases from 1.23 teraflops to over 6 teraflops, allowing for 4K (and VR?) gaming. Scorpio will have 40 "compute units" (AMD terminology), compared to the 16 of its predecessor. The GPU seems to be more powerful than an AMD RX 480. In comparison, the PS4 Pro's GPU performance is rated at 4.2 teraflops.

Scorpio will include 12 GB of GDDR5 memory, 8 GB of which will be usable by games. The Xbox One came with 8 GB of DDR3 memory, with only 5 GB usable by games. System memory bandwidth has been more than quadrupled to 326 GB/s from 68.3 GB/s, and the memory bus width has increased to 384-bit from 256-bit. The small amount of embedded memory found in the Xbox 360 and Xbox One has been cut in this new design, due to the massive increase in overall memory bandwidth.

One odd detail: both the Xbox One S (for "slim") and Project Scorpio will come with 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray optical drives, while Sony, the Blu-ray champion, did not include support for the format in the PS4 Pro. UHD Blu-ray defines optical discs with capacities of 50, 66, and 100 GB. For storage, Scorpio will come with a 1 TB hard drive (at least initially).

Will the 8-core design (with at least 7 usable by games, and likely still one thread per core) result in more multi-threading and utilization of more cores in PC games? Both the Xbox One and PS4 were released in November 2013 with 8-core x86 CPUs.


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 07 2017, @05:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 07 2017, @05:19PM (#490359)

    That joke went so far over your head that I had to report it to the FAA.

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