Microsoft Explains Why They Did Not Go for Ryzen in Project Scorpio

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In a reply to Eurogamer, Microsoft explained as to why the company has not opted an AMD Ryzen CPU for their Project Scorpio. Basically they claim they can achieve their performance targets without Ryzen, Jaguar cores would be fast enough without being a CPU bottleneck. 



In short, they likely opted a solution where the jaguar cores have been tweaked in such a fashion that the system would not see a CPU bottleneck. The company would probably wanted eight physical CPU cores in its SoC. Since Ryzen cores are considerably larger they also are more costly to use on a console SoC. 

On the CPU side, there's been much conjecture that Scorpio would feature AMD's new Ryzen technology - something we thought unlikely, owing to manufacturing timelines, not to mention Microsoft telling us last year that the new console would feature eight CPU cores. All signs point to the upclocked Jaguar cores we find in Xbox One, and Scorpio's CPU set-up is indeed an evolution of that tech, but subject to extensive customisation and the offloading of key tasks to dedicated hardware.

"So, eight cores, organised as two clusters with a total of 4MB of L2 cache. These are unique customised CPUs for Scorpio running at 2.3GHz. Alluding back to the goals, we wanted to maintain 100 per cent backwards compatibility with Xbox One and Xbox One S while also pushing the performance envelope," says Nick Baker.

It seems clear that the Xbox team changed this SoC significantly with specific performance targets in mind. Although the design is based on AMD architecture, many things changed and have been added. since there is a display controller with HDMI 2.1-support as well as hardware based DirectX 12 API calls.

Microsoft Explains Why They Did Not Go for Ryzen in Project Scorpio


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