The pitch presented at the E3 press conference for Project Scorpio is plain and simple. While some of the claims sound a little bizarre or straight-out laughable (uncompressed pixels?), Microsoft aims to regain control of the technological high ground with its own mid-generation console refresh. What we're looking at here is an ambitious leap-frogging of the PlayStation 4K Neo in technological terms, with Microsoft utilising the top-tier parts available from hardware partner AMD - technology we've yet to see fully revealed in the PC space.
...First up, let's discuss the GPU - the area of the spec that Microsoft is clearly most proud of. The rumoured six TFLOPs of processing power is confirmed, out-stripping the 4.2TF found in PlayStation Neo by quite some margin. It's around 40 per cent faster, calling to mind the advantage PS4 had over Xbox One.
However, based on the differential in spec between Neo and Scorpio, it's unlikely that the new Microsoft console uses Polaris at all. A 40 CU part would need a mighty overclock to hit 6TF, and based on the rendered imagery we've seen, the heating assembly planned for Scorpio looks a little lacklustre. With that in mind, our money is on a downclocked version of AMD's upcoming Vega technology. Thanks to an AMD engineer rather unwisely posting a partial spec for Vega on his LinkedIn profile (!) we know that the fully enabled processor features 64 compute units. Assuming that this is cut down to 56 CUs (as in the Radeon R9 Fury, a pared back version of the 64 CU Fury X), a clock speed in the 830-850MHz region looks likely. Alternatively, and perhaps more likely, we could be seeing 60 CUs at 800MHz. Both represent a substantial increase over PlayStation 4K Neo, while the raw increase to performance over PS4 and Xbox One is obviously much larger.
...Microsoft also dropped some hard figures in terms of memory bandwidth too, telling us that Scorpio has over 320GB/s of throughput. This gives us a couple of useful data points. Firstly, it's almost certainly the case that the ESRAM experiment on Xbox One is now a thing of the past - Microsoft will be following the approach pioneered by Sony in using a single, unified pool of memory based on PC graphics RAM technology. Which technology that is remains to be seen - will it be GDDR5 or the faster G5X found in Nvidia's GTX 1080? The stated figure of 320GB/s can be achieved with 8GB of G5X using a 256-bit bus, or alternatively it could be using a 384-bit interface paired with 12GB of GDDR5. Now, this is where the stylised renderings of the Scorpio motherboard prove rather useful as we can count the amount of memory modules on the board - 12 memory chips are visible, confirming the use of current-gen memory tech and not the HBM2 we expect to see on Vega and Nvidia's next-gen Titan. This also seems to suggest that Scorpio has another big advantage over PlayStation 4K Neo - not just over 100GB/s more bandwidth, but also an additional 4GB of onboard RAM.
On the flipside, we have heard from some developers that the 8GB of memory found in PlayStation Neo isn't quite enough to get the most out of 4K displays.
...There are two theoretical CPU technologies available to Microsoft here - the existing Jaguar cores (or perhaps a more modern version thereof), or AMD's upcoming Zen technology. Weighing the balance of probabilities, we'd say that it's unlikely to be Zen - if it were, we'd expect Microsoft to have made a much bigger deal of it. But secondly, what we know of the eight-core Zen is that it's a high-end desktop processor that's likely to require a large area of silicon. Integrating that alongside an already large GPU core seems overly ambitious.
...It's a remarkable turnabout. A good portion of PlayStation 4's success has been down to its spec advantage over Xbox One, combined with a focus on the hardcore player. Sony's technological advantage will be gone with the next wave of hardware - we already know that it cannot support true 4K resolution on cutting-edge games, because we've seen the internal documents that outline Sony's upscaling strategies for 4K display support (more on that soon). It's also unfeasible for Sony to produce a radically revised Neo - the silicon has been designed, developer kits have gone out. Matching Scorpio would require scrapping Neo's existing processor completely.
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