The Xbox One Scorpio is truly an impressive machine- Digital Foundry recently got to see it in its finalized form, and they got loads of images, that you can see for yourself below. The end result is a well designed, high end, powerful console that uses state of the art tech to deliver the highest fidelity possible for consoles.
The Scorpio Engine is the new system on chip (SoC) that lies at the heart of the machine- it is a 16nm FinFET chip produced by TSMC, with seven billion transistors containing a custom CPU cluster and 40 customized Radeon compute units- among other things. In other words, this is as densely packed and high end as it is currently possible to get.
The SoC apart, the Scorpio uses 12GB of GDDR5 RAM, which is available via 6.8GHz GDDR5 modules operating across a 384-bit memory interface- which represents a substantial improvement over not just the existing Xbox One and Xbox One S, but also the PS4 and PS4 Pro. A lot of the gains for the Scorpio come from how efficient the entire machine is. Scorpio achieves this, at least in part, by utilizing a technique called the Hovis Method, and calibrating every motherboard to the precise processor it is paired with.
The result of all of this? Microsoft is using what might be a first for mainstream consumer grade tech. The Scorpio features a vapor-chamber cooling, which is very similar to the kind of cooling setups seen on high end PC GPUs such as GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti- this machine will probably run hot (and hey, at least Microsoft appears to have kept proper heat dissipation in mind this time around).
The Scorpio, then, is truly impressive tech- check the gallery below if you want to take a look at the heart of the technology that will power this new console. The Scorpio is launching later this year- hopefully, more details are incoming soon.