Disclaimer - not an April Fools' joke.
Jez Corden, Senior Editor for Xbox at WindowsCentral.com, revealed some new information on Xbox Scorpio via Twitter earlier today. The biggest news is that the enhanced Xbox One might be unveiled to the public as early as next week, possibly even before next Saturday.
It's true that Project Scorpio is going to be shown off very soon.
— Jez ???????? (@JezCorden) 1 aprile 2017
next week soon https://t.co/noI0C0rKiE
— Jez ???????? (@JezCorden) 1 aprile 2017
@Seriouslyfra @SwanNoble yep, before E3, maybe even before next Saturday!
— Jez ???????? (@JezCorden) 1 aprile 2017
Corden also talked a bit about the Xbox Scorpio dev kits as well as possible Bluetooth support in the final hardware. There shouldn't be a Kinect port, though.
Scorpio dev kits have an LCD front panel that devs can use to see stats in real time too, pretty cool.
— Jez ???????? (@JezCorden) 1 aprile 2017
Scorpio dev kit's front panel even has a nifty animation. FANCY.
— Jez ???????? (@JezCorden) 1 aprile 2017
btw Scorpio might have Bluetooth support
— Jez ???????? (@JezCorden) 1 aprile 2017
btw Scorpio might have Bluetooth support
— Jez ???????? (@JezCorden) 1 aprile 2017
According to him, Xbox Scorpio won't surpass the specifications announced by Microsoft during E3 2016 (8 CPU cores, 6 teraflops of computing power, 320GB/s of memory bandwidth with the goal of achieving "true 4K gaming) but it will have the promised 6 teraflops. This would put it way ahead of PlayStation 4 Pro's 4.2 teraflops.
@JOIRQ Unlikely. Optimizations always happen over time, though, as devs/tools develop and improve.
— Jez ???????? (@JezCorden) 1 aprile 2017
@JOIRQ 6TF yep!
— Jez ???????? (@JezCorden) 1 aprile 2017
Again, Jez Corden made it abundantly clear this is not a joke. However, it should be treated as a rumor for now, with all that entails. Still, WindowsCentral is perhaps the biggest Microsoft-focused website and it proved its credibility over the last few years.
@xLUSTx naw, everything I've tweeted is not April Fools, except for the idea Microsoft will care about Windows Phones again
— Jez ???????? (@JezCorden) 1 aprile 2017
Staying on the Xbox Scorpio leak topic, it's worth remembering that a couple months ago Digital Foundry claimed to have seen a whitepaper shared by Microsoft on its development portal.
The article contained a few more tidbits on the specifications. Scorpio won't feature the ESRAM unlike Xbox One; its GPU will have 4.5x computing power compared to the XB1 and 4x times L2 cache; the hardware will support delta color compression (DCC) just like PlayStation 4 Pro, with the specific goal to reduce the amount of GPU bandwidth consumed to render color pixels.
We'll see if Microsoft chooses to unveil the enhanced Xbox One, Scorpio, next week. Even if it doesn't, we should know a lot more in the next couple months leading up to E3 2017 (June 13-15, Los Angeles Convention Center).
