Microsoft's Project Scorpio, which was announced by the company in 2016, has been subjected to innumerable leaks and rumors. Project Scorpio is said to be a leveled-up version of the company's Xbox One gaming console.
Earlier in January, details of Project Scorpio leaked online and revealed the absence of ESRAM. The leak also shared that the console would offer true 4K and VR support.
While most of the specs for the impending gaming console have leaked, the design of the device has remained a mystery — until now.
Now, renders of the dev kit shared by Gamasutra, reveal what the console may look like. The publication was given access to the Project Scorpio dev kit by folks at Microsoft, who were involved in the device's design.
Xbox Project Scorpio Dev Kit Renders
The images reveal a device which looks similar to the Xbox One S console, but is much larger in size. The dev kit's design is a blend of two hues: black and white. While the top part of the device is white, the bottom section sports a black hue. The renders reveal that the lower portion houses the Blu-ray drive and the expansion ports.
The renders also reveal the presence of a real-time clock and five programmable buttons on the front of the device, along with an OLED display.
Microsoft opted to change the specs of the developer kit from the retail version of Xbox Project Scorpio. The dev kit features 24 GB of RAM instead of the 12 GB of RAM on the retail version. This version also houses 1 TB SSD and 1 TB HDD. The latter is also reportedly present on the consumer variant of the console.
The dev kit also includes vents on its sides, so that developers are able to stack the Xbox Project Scorpio units atop each other. The dev kit also has a network interface card for debug information, as well as three USB ports. The ports are located on the front of the device. The dev kit is more powerful than the retail version of the console and packs in 44 CUs on the GPU vis-à-vis 40.
Moreover, a high-speed transfer cable will be bundled with the dev kits, which the company claims is able to push 100 GB data in roughly four minutes.
Microsoft's Thoughts On Project Scorpio Dev Kit
Kevin Gammil, Microsoft's program manager for Xbox Core Platform, revealed to Gamasutra that the company spent plenty of time and effort in a bid to decrease the "iteration time for developers."
"Everything from quickly getting dev kits up and running, to the fast transfer cable, all of that is focused towards tightening that iteration loop. Where a developer can debug, fix the bug, redeploy, test. That all needs to be as tight as possible, because the faster they can do that, the better the game's gonna be," noted Gammil.
The Xbox Project Scorpio will supposedly be launched during E3 2017 in June. Further information about the console's capabilities and pricing would likely be revealed at the time.
