Digital Foundry: Scorpio Spec leak - "might suggest console isn't the "true" 4k console as MS claimed"

[Pemalite]

EricHiggin said:

Pro doubled the PS4 Pitcairn CU's from 18 to 36, so could Scorpio quadruple or more the XB1 Bonaire CU's from 12 to 48 or even 60 maybe?

The Playstation 4's GPU from the beginning was not a direct clone of Pitcairn, it had some customizations such as the ACE units.

The Xbox One might take a similar approach though, so a direct quad-drupling of most of the chip is a possibility... It's hard to say which direction they will go at the moment.
Vega will be more clock-rate optimized than Polaris, which microsoft could take advantage of, so they could get away with a smaller chip but higher clock speeds.

EricHiggin said:

I dunno. I guess anything is possible, but I dont see why just using Polaris wouldn't make more sense. Its still GCN, its cheap, its in production, its 14nm, and already has 36 CU's which brings it to a max stock 5.8Tflops. With semi custom they wouldn't have to add all that many more CU's to reach the target 6Tflops at an acceptable clock rate.

True.

EricHiggin said:

They have to be waiting for Ryzen or Vega or both. There is no reason for XB to hold back Scorpio an entire year if they were just going to take the XB1 and beef it up just like how PS4 was beefed up to become Pro.

They likely didn't start their half-gen upgrade untill well after Sony, so that explains part of the delay.

EricHiggin said:

Maybe it's a higher clocked Jag or Puma but I would hope not, and with Phil mentioning balance multiple times they would need very high clocks on those CPU's. Could be the newer low power Carrizo Excavator CPU's, slap 2X 4 core together like XB1 Jag and theres your 8 cores.

There is some potential improvements that we know of already, such as the L2 Cache (IF it is for the CPU and not the GPU that is.)
An increase of 4x is nothing to sneeze at.
The Xbox One and Playstation 4 have 4Mb of total L2 Cache (In a 2x2Mb configuration) and the Xbox One could be quad-drupling that number to 16Mb or 2x8Mb, that should result in some decent performance gains for the CPU without touching on clock rates.

The reason why we might as well not expect an Excavator based Carrizo or Zen is cost.
Those chips eat up a ton of transistors that could be spent on the GPU.

EricHiggin said:

I still think XB knows they screwed up big time with XB1, and they know their exclusive line up can't match PS or NIN, so the only thing to do is offer a really powerful console at an acceptable price. Something like what PS4 was at launch, but even more powerful for its time, like the 360. Something that would cast a dark shadow on PS4 and Pro in terms of hardware. Ryzen would most certainly do that whether Scorpio uses Bonaire, Polaris, or Vega.

Basically a Halo product.
AMD and nVidia don't release high-end GPU's like Fury and Titan because they move a ton of hardware and make a ton of cash... They sell them because it is a Halo product, people look at Benchmarks and see AMD or nVidia on top and think that company is better overall... And that can boost the sales of other GPU's.