With the Xbox One Scorpio hitting the market by the end of the year, there will now be three separate Xbox SKUs on the market, all three with at least minor variation in their hardware- however, Microsoft is doing its diligence on the backend to ensure that it is easier for developers to support all the extra hardware without much extra work on their end.
According to Gamasutra, Scorpio development kits will apparently come with a ‘toggle’ to let developers switch between the Xbox One, Xbox One S, and Xbox Scorpio; Microsoft has also taken feedback from developers into account, and incorporated many small, but useful, quality of life improvement features. For instance, a small OLED screen is attached to the development kit hardware, which can display relevant and useful information, such as the frames per second that the code is hitting.
The dev kit also has a real time clock with battery backup, an additional three front-facing USB ports (more than you get on the consumer hardware), an extra NIC (network interface card) for transmitting debug information while running a multiplayer game, and a new high-speed transfer cable with theoretical data transfer speeds of 100GB in 4 minutes- in other words, all the kinds of hardware and improvements that can make developers’ lives immeasurably easier.
Of course, we already know that Microsoft has made multiple concessions for developers with the Scorpio development kits to be able to make their work easy for them- it’s just that the true extent of that is only now starting to be clear. It looks like Microsoft really wants developers to take to Scorpio like they did to the Xbox 360 back in the day.