Thanks to a trailer released last month, we have a good idea of the outside design Microsoft’s Xbox Series X. Last year’s E3 coverage also gave us a quick glimpse of its internals, but those were likely rendered rather than the real thing. To cash in on the CES 2020 hype, Xbox head Phil Spencer has silently changed his profile picture to the console’s custom SoC.
Admittedly, it’s not all that much to look at. The chunky design of the chip pretty much matches what we saw last year, aside from the copper body. That has the Series X’s code-name, Project Scarlett, emblazoned in the bottom-right corner. Meanwhile, its left features an 8K symbol, setting in stone Microsoft’s target for the next generation. In the left-center is a QR code, which is unfortunately unscannable, while the top left holds a very faint Xbox logo.
Pretty or not, the Series X chip marks a milestone, hinting that the company is beginning to gear up for launch. We don’t know a whole lot about the specs of the CPU, though several leaks from AMD were discovered last week that give some indications and a lot of info about the PS5.
Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter predicts a processor with eight Zen 2 cores with SM2 from the information he’s seen, but there has been no disclosure of clock speeds. For reference, the Xbox One X had eight Jaguar cores at 2.3 GHz, while the base Xbox One had the same cores at 1.75 GHz.
In the GPU department, unconfirmed, estimated specs point to 56 Navi compute units for the Series X at around 1700MHz. Its memory is thought to be GDDR6 at 560GB/s. With hope, the latest development from Spencer means Microsoft has its hardware finalized and will be ready to share detailed specs soon. More likely, though, we’ll have to wait until E3 2020 to get a proper confirmation of the numbers.
