Project Scorpio is coming soon. The world’s most powerful console is coming holiday 2017. Featuring a mind-blowing 6 Teraflops of graphical processing power, true 4K gaming and compatibility with Xbox One games and accessories, the console is one of Microsoft’s most awaited products this year. The Scorpio Engine boasts of 6 Teraflops, 326GB/s Memory bandwidth and advanced, custom silicon. We all know about the core specs of Project Scorpio but the details about Scorpio Engine SoC weren’t revealed. Now, we have first glimpses of what the SoC is made up of.
Project Scorpio has elements of Vega GPU architecture
According to latest reports, the base hardware designs that went into making the components and the blocks within Scorpio Engine SoC are heavily derived from AMD. Scorpio’s Radeon graphics sports features from AMD’s latest Polaris architecture. What’s more interesting is the fact that some performance optimizations from AMD’s Vega architecture are part of the Scorpio Engine design.
However, some of the other features that PS4 Pro boasts of – like double-rate FP16 processing – are not part of Scorpio Engine. Apparently, a lot of customization has gone into CPU and GPU. Explaining about the enhancements, Nick Baker, Distinguished Engineer, Silicon had this to say –
It’s a completely unique design… you wouldn’t be able to buy this anywhere else and really, we created this is in conjunction with AMD and it is a nice unique part for Scorpio.
Typically for CPU, the top two items are frequency and memory latency. If the CPU has data, the faster it can process it, the quicker the result, but it also means that if it doesn’t have the data, it sits there idle, so latency is a big component. On frequency, we pushed it up to 2.3GHz. On the latency, a couple of the areas we tackled, one was all the queues coming back from the memory interface, we sped those up as well. Specifically, within the core, because we’re running a virtualised OS environment, we wanted to optimise how memory translation operations happen so there are some key changes inside the core to speed those things up. The end result is that not only does the CPU run faster, it also runs more efficiently meaning more power for you at the end
Project Scorpio is definitely going to be a big one for Microsoft. Project Scorpio’s first-of-its-kind Vapor Chamber uses advanced liquid cooling to ensure Scorpio Engine stays cool. The cooling system is aided by a supercharger-style Centrifugal Fan that rapidly pulls in and compresses air to deliver maximum cooling. And to maximize performance and minimize power consumption, Project Scorpio uses the Hovis Method – a cutting-edge digital power delivery system that tunes each console’s voltage.
In short – true 4K Gaming, 6 Teraflop CPU, 2.3GHz Custom CPU, 1TB HDD Storage, 12GB GDDR5 Memory, 326 GB/s Memory Bandwidth and 4K UHD Blue-ray/DVD – Project Scorpio is a beast!
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