Microsoft recently gave some reporters from the website Digital Foundry a sneak peek under the hood at XBox Scorpio, the codenamed souped-up version of the XBox One that’s supposed to retail this fall. XBox has sworn up and down that this console will stomp the competition into the dirt tech-wise. Will it be worth a purchase? Here’s what we found out….
The Scorpio’s CPU boasts eight custom x86 cores clocked at 2.3 GHz, and a GPU crammed with 40 Radeon compute units rolling at 1172 MHz. It can give a performance boost to any existing XBox One game and it will be able to run the compatible 360 games as well. Scorpio has 6 teraflops of processing power and a memory bandwidth of 320 gigs a second. It also has 12 GB of GDDR5 memory and a 1 TB 2.5-inch hard drive, and for the cherry on the sundae, a 4K UHD Blu-ray drive.
What the Scorpio won’t do is act nice with your wallet. All this power is projected to make it the most expensive current-gen console currently on the market (or about to be on the market). Estimates place the possible MSRP at $499, though Microsoft has not made an official announcement yet. One other thing the Scorpio won’t do is run the Kinect — it has no port for it and the market for such games is dead anyway.
What about every gamer’s biggest fear here? Could the Scorpio wreck the hardware market by paywalling off the newest games and changing the adoption rate to one new generation every two to three years? Microsoft says no, and that’s a statement that comes with commitment. They absolutely will not allow any game to be a Scorpio exclusive — it’s against their rules.
It’s a guarantee that anything else you need to know about the Scorpio will be revealed at E3 this June. If you have further questions, just wait a few months.
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