Phil Spencer has recently made it very clear that he views the Xbox One Scorpio as a premium product, and that its price should reflect that, which has led to persistent speculation regarding just how high the new console may be priced. However, in an interview with AusGamers, Spencer has clarified his stance, stating that he still wants the system to be priced like a console, instead of a gaming PC.
“When you talk to me about Scorpio, the term I use about the architecture isn’t the six teraflops which is obviously what we’ve announced, it’s balance,” he said. “Really what it is, is you want a platform that is balanced between memory bandwidth, GPU power, you know, your ability to move memory and [an] amount of memory around in many ways is more inhibiting to the performance of your game than absolute teraflops on any one of the individual pieces, and when we designed Scorpio we really thought about this balanced rig that could come together at a price-point. Like, I want Scorpio to be at a console price-point, I’m not trying to go and compete with a high-end rig. And because we’re building one spec, we’re able to look at the balance between all the components and make sure that it’s something we really hit that matters to consumers and gamers.”
Which seems to indicate that while 6 TFLOPs is a massive amount of power, the system will definitely have some trade offs in order to keep costs under control. I just hope Microsoft don’t skimp out on the RAM- that would be foolish and short sighted.