Curiously, developers can choose to run with eight physical cores at the higher clock, or all cores and threads can be enabled with a lower 3.6GHz frequency. This is when SMT - or hyper-threading - is disabled.
Microsoft is promising a 4x improvement in both single-core and overall throughput over Xbox One X - and CPU speeds are impressive, with a peak 3.8GHz frequency. The chip itself is a 360mm 2 slice of silicon (significantly smaller than we speculated), that pairs customised versions of AMD's Zen 2 CPU core with 12.155 teraflops of GPU compute power.Īs expected, we're getting eight CPU cores and 16 threads, delivered via two quad-core units on the silicon, with one CPU core (or two threads) reserved for running the underlying operating system and the front-end 'shell'. The processor is fabricated on an enhanced rendition of TSMC's 7nm process, which we understand rolls up a bunch of improvements to the technology, right up to but not including the new EUV-based 7nm+. With power, it all begins with the Project Scarlett SoC - system on chip. Microsoft doubtless has its own messaging to share built around these pillars, but they also serve as a solid foundation for our story too. It all starts with the three key tenets that the next generation Xbox is built upon: power, speed and compatibility.
In this piece, we'll be looking in depth at the tech powering the new machine, and we'll reveal: There's a vast amount of material to share but for now, we'll be trying to deliver the key points with the promise of much more to come. We've had a taster of some brilliant backwards compatibility features - and yes, today we can reveal the full, official specification for the Xbox Series X console. We've seen the NVMe expandable storage, we've had our first taste of hardware accelerated ray tracing on next-gen console and we've seen how one of Microsoft's most talented developers is looking to enhance one of the most technically impressive games available today for the new Xbox. We visited Microsoft's Redmond WA mothership in the first week of March, we saw the unit, handled it, played on it and even constructed it from its component parts. After months of teaser trailers, blog posts and even the occasional leak, we can finally reveal firm, hard facts on Xbox Series X.