The Xbox One Scorpio is going to launch next year, and with a 6 TFLOPs GPU, it is primed to be the most powerful console ever made. But according to Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, there is so much more that makes a Scorpio as powerful as it is, other than just the GPU.
“Well, I try not to really talk using the term,” Spencer said in an interview with Stevivor. “It’s like a car — you wouldn’t describe how fast it goes using only one characteristic. But I guess it’s like a teraflop is like horsepower — you’d probably have in your head what 100 horsepower could do, or 200.
“But it’s much more than that — there’s other things that dictate how fast the car goes. A transmission. Its weight. It’s the same with Scorpio; it’s not just the number of teraflops that makes it powerful.”
It being as powerful as it is is because it is a culmination of decisions years in the making, Spencer revealed. “We had to make decisions like 4K — to run games in 4K natively — years ago,” he said. “We thought it would be like the jump to HD with the Xbox 360. Obviously, it’s different — that was from a 4:3 ratio to 16:9 — but it’s still the same idea.”
So with how big of a jump the Scorpio is, by his same admission, is it a next generation system, or a current generation one? Spencer won’t reveal, with the only thing that he said being “I just consider it as part of the Xbox family.” I notice he didn’t say ‘Xbox One family,’ which he was very careful to say during E3, this time.
The Xbox One Scorpio is due to launch in Holiday 2017.