Microsoft has just revealed the entire specifications sheet for the upcoming Xbox Series X entertainment system. They are hoping with this hardware that the console can go toe-to-toe with a modern gaming desktop. Looking at the specifications it will be interesting to see how if Microsoft can even break even at around $500.
At the heart of the system you have a semi-custom SoC in which Microsoft partnered with AMD. They are using “Zen 2” x86-64 CPU cores and Microsoft confirmed that the SoC will be built on the 7 nm “enhanced” process. The die size is 360.45 mm². The chip will have 8 “Zen 2” cores with SMT enabling 16 logical processors. The CPU will run at a nominal clock of 3.80 GHz and around 3.66 GHz with SMT enabled. This is a nice upgrade from the current 8-core “Jaguar enhanced” CPU that powered the Xbox One X. Cache sizes were not made available.
The other part of the SoC is of course the graphics processor. This GPU will be based on AMD’s upcoming RDNA2 graphics architecture, which will feature real-time ray tracing and support for variable-rate shading (VRS). The GPU has 52 compute units (3,328 stream processors provided each CU has 64 stream processors in RDNA2). The GPU has a clock speed of 1825 MHz with a peak compute throughput of 12 TFLOPs. The display engine will support resolutions up to 8K, even though the consoles performance is targeting 4K 60FPS and up to 120FPS.
The memory interface will be 320-bit GGDR6 holding 16GB of memory. What is interesting about the memory is that 10 GB of it will run at 560 GB/s bandwidth, while 6 GB of it runs at 336 GB/s.
For storage you get a 1 TB NVMe SSD with 2400 MB/s peak sequential transfer rate, and an option for an additional 1 TB NVMe storage through an expansion module. External storage devices are also supported too with 10 Gbps USB 3.2 gen 2. The drive will also have a Blu-ray drive that supports 4K UHD Blu-ray playback.
