After a pitch-perfect, well choreographed introduction to Xbox One X way back in 2016, hopes were high that Microsoft could repeat the trick for the crucial reveal of Project Scarlett at this year’s E3. New details were indeed unveiled, major claims were made – but Microsoft muddied the waters somewhat with messaging that still leaves us unclear about what the new box is actually about, how powerful it is and what the vision is that separates it from Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 5, built from the same technological building blocks.
Let’s confirm what is definitely on the table – spec points that with one exception are point-for-point the same as Sony’s recent next-gen announcement. For starters, both boxes use AMD’s new Zen 2 CPU core – the basis of the Ryzen 3000 products arriving for PC users next month. Meanwhile, Microsoft also revealed that AMD’s next-gen RDNA-powered Navi technology delivers the graphics muscle for Scarlett – just as it does for the next PlayStation. The platform holder also announced ray tracing support for its new machine, a feature that’s also found in PS5 – though Sony has been reticent to explicitly confirm actual hardware acceleration for the job (our money is on the affirmative though).
Then there’s the SSD – another hardware point that Sony revealed first, with Microsoft following suit. Another aspect that ties together both platform holders’ next-gen announcements is a lack of information on the graphics core. On top of that, there are some curious factoids in Microsoft’s reveal that do need some clarification. Scarlett was defined as the biggest generational leap in console technology that the firm has delivered – but I do think it hard to see the computational leap from OG Xbox to the Xbox 360 being bettered. Meanwhile, the 16x increase in RAM allocation seen moving from Xbox 360 to Xbox One is highly unlikely to be surpassed. Then there’s the notion of Scarlett delivering a 4x leap in ‘processing performance’ over Xbox One X. On the CPU side, this does seem likely but the idea of the machine delivering an equivalent of 24 teraflops of GPU compute is unlikely.
Based on our own information, along with teasing reveals within the Scarlett announcement trailer, here are my thoughts on the set-up of the box – well, one of them at least. Curiously, Microsoft is using very strange PR-speak to avoid the question of the leaked lower-end box, codenamed Lockhart. Another interesting aspect is that while the Xbox One X reveal effectively told us the RAM allocation, SoC size, teraflop count and even clued us in on the cooler, Microsoft is being a lot more coy this time around and there may even be some red herrings in the assets this time around.
AMD’s Zen 2 technology has been confirmed for both Scarlett and PlayStation 5, but not a whole lot more. What we do know is that Sony has confirmed eight cores – a design foundation for the architecture – and thus it’s likely that Microsoft will follow suit. The efficiency of the core has seen some fundamental improvements from its first-gen revision, but comparisons with the desktop PC versions seen so far can only go so far. It’s unlikely that we’ll get the 35MB of L3 cache announced for the new Ryzens, for example. The use of AMD’s new scalable ‘chiplet’ architecture (where groups of eight cores can be clustered together for 16, or even 32 cores in total) also seems unlikely.