https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9zIvjH3S54
I've copy and pasted some bits that sound important from the article, but I don't know what they are going on about generally. Much more at link below
For starters, Xbox One's contentious ESRAM is gone
ESRAM remains essential to achieving high performance on both Xbox One and Xbox One S," the whitepaper reveals. "However, Project Scorpio and PC are not provided with ESRAM. Because developers are not allowed to ship a Project Scorpio-only SKU, optimising for ESRAM remains critical to performance on Microsoft platforms."
There are other clues as to Scorpio's final hardware set-up within the whitepaper. The six teraflop GPU is once again confirmed, with the GPU's compute power rated at around 4.5 times the capabilities of Xbox One. Four times more L2 cache is also confirmed - a new detail that does not tell us that much, except that that the GPU architecture in Scorpio is at least as modern as AMD's Polaris line. Based on our discussions with Mark Cerny on PS4 Pro, we can reasonably assume that Microsoft can customise its GPU core just as Sony did, with access to Radeon roadmap features up to - and perhaps beyond - AMD's upcoming Vega architecture. Microsoft gives away little here, other than to confirm that delta colour compression (DCC) is a part of the Scorpio GPU feature set, just as it is in PS4 Pro.
It's the application of Scorpio's power that is the focus of Microsoft's whitepaper, and other hints about the hardware make-up of the console are few and far between. In the wake of CES, there is renewed speculation that Scorpio may feature more advanced Zen CPU cores. However, a throwaway comment within the Microsoft whitepaper on how developers may wish to use Scorpio's capabilities again makes this seem unlikely.
But what the whitepaper doesn't cover could also prove instrumental in Scorpio delivering more titles that run effectively on 4K screens. In our original Scorpio spec analysis, our primary concern was the size of the processor based on the six teraflop GPU, where a 56 or 60 compute unit chip seemed most plausible. We now know that AMD's next-gen Vega GPU boasts considerably improved frequencies - and the faster it runs, the fewer CUs are required to hit the 6TF target. Just 40 CUs at 1.18GHz could deliver Scorpio's stated 6TF, or 44 at 1.07GHz. On top of that, Vega's use of a tile-based rasteriser (widely seen as the key to Nvidia's performance lead in its Maxwell GPU technology) could also yield dividends in delivering a more capable 4K console.
On the face of it, the in-depth discussion of techniques like this may be suggesting that Scorpio isn't the 'true 4K' console that Microsoft marketed it as at E3 2016. But the practical reality is that the document confirms that at least one first-party 1080p title has transitioned relatively easily to native 4K (our best guess would be the Forza Motorsport engine is the technology in question here), and accepts the reality that GPU resources aren't always best spent on precision pixel-work at ultra HD resolutions.
But to clear, this is speculation based on what we now know about new Radeon features open to Microsoft. The whitepaper we've seen - dated to just after Scorpio's E3 reveal - only confirms no ESRAM, boosted L2 cache and support for memory compression technology. Beyond that, all we have to go on is Microsoft's stated 320GB/s bandwidth, eight CPU cores - plus a motherboard rendering strongly suggesting 12GB of GDDR5 memory. How the final spec will shape up remains to be seen, but from the whitepaper details to the Vega enhancements available to Microsoft, we should be a seeing a highly capable 4K contender.
