Xbox Scorpio powered by 14 nm Polaris + Zen SoC for 4K gaming

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That's a could be, Microsoft  announced their high-end Xbox Scorpio console and meanwhile AMD confirmed it'll be powered by a semi-custom SoC--which will likely be based on Polaris and Zen.



Microsoft has confirmed that its new 4K-ready Xbox Scorpio rocks 6TFLOPS of power, reports Tweaktown, that would be 1.5x what the PS4K can do. As reported on Tweaktown:

Microsoft states the Xbox Scorpio will house the "most powerful console GPU ever," and there's a very good chance the console is powered by an SoC outfitted with AMD's new Zen CPU and Polaris GPU--especially since AMD just confirmed that the Scorpio is powered by asemi-custom SoC from AMD.

Apart from the obvious clues like 1080p 60FPS and 4K gaming and VR support, the Scorpio's confirmed specs also neatly match up with AMD's next-generation APUs. But given AMD's statements on the Scorpio's hardware, the console will use a SoC (and Microsoft has said the same). The Xbox Scorpio's custom SoC has an 8-core CPU, and AMD's Zen CPU sports 8-cores with 16 threads. Seems like a perfect match there. AMD is also suspected to release its next-generation APUs in 2017, fitting with the Scorpio's holiday 2017 launch, so there's a good chance the custom Zen/Polaris SoC would be ready.

"As we bring the high-performance CPU to life, we're also going to integrate Zen with our high-performance graphics in our next-generation APUs. So after Bristol Ridge, you will see integrated APUs with Zen and our GPU architectures. And you'll also see Zen across a number of embedded markets. The power of Zen's grounds-up design allows us to scale it across performance segments as well as low-power markets," AMD president and CEO Lisa Su said at the company's Computex 2016 event.

Zen and Polaris SoC combo could indeed power the Xbox Scorpio. "I have spoken to Senior AMD management was told that we won't see 14nm APUs until 2017, so a holiday 2017 for a Polaris and Zen-based APU seems reasonable and very doable," he said.

Xbox One Scorpio confirmed specs:

  • 6 TFLOPs of performance
  • 320GB per second memory bandwith
  • 8CPU Cores

Even with AMD's high-performance Polaris/Zen SoC, the Scorpio might be the first console to leverage the power of desktop-grade video cards via external enclosures. This would give the Scorpio a tremendous push in horsepower, possibly enabling fluid framerates at native 4K and dramatically lowering latency in VR. AMD has teased such an enclosure in the past, and it's possible that Microsoft could make a highly-customized enclosure for, say, a Radeon RX 480 to slot into. In any case, it's a good bet that the new high-end Xbox One Scorpio console will pack a Polaris + Zen-powered SoC when it releases in holiday 2017.

Xbox Scorpio powered by 14 nm Polaris + Zen SoC for 4K gaming


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