Xbox Scorpio New Specs Announced: Your thoughts.

You can probably buy 3-4 Scorpio for what that PC cost you - so enjoy your gaming on PC 3-4 times more. Just a 1070 gpu cost about a PS4 Pro.

But Scorpio is not a new set of rules - just a gaming console which will rule them all for the convenience that a console is.

A PC has more overhead running ordinary Windows, doing so many different things all the time, so some advantage is lost.

Cores and threads - your PC run thousands of threads, which are time sharing where cpu jump between different tasks in parallell you could say.

Multi core cpu - can switch between cores a bit quicker than you can between threads. Less things that needs saving away, to later return to and restore and continue processing, kind of.

And a process is a set of threads, spread over various cores. And ability to lock a core to a thread you can boost performance on what it is doing, not having to switch to many threads on that core.

An operating system can run many processes, and a process is also time sharing and one stops shortly but run in it's own memory space allocated to it.

That was the big thing going from MSDOS to Windows being able to run many programs/processes at one time.

And you could say that a gaming console is like a PC on the MSDOS day, in that it mainly run one app at a time. Not doing a hundred things while running a game, a few, but not a hundred.

Multi cores is not quite the same as many cpu units really since they share the same memory and must stop processing while another core access memory.

A quad core is not like 4 PC's.

Now tech class is over....

 

UP... VOTED. I've got a few years on you and see it pretty much the same. I may not "feel" all that young, but that's because of health problems. Not because I have to dust off my attitude when I get up in the morning.

Yeah, consoles/UIs, even these forums don't come with an age limit and anyone with a little common sense will realize they'll be used by a wide range of ages... therefor they need to be intuitive, appealing and approachable for all ages, not just short sighted
Gerontophobic whims.

 

Thanks for your opinion, but allow me to correct some of your assumptions or concepts.

Even though you can't compare an embedded system like a gaming console with a full blown PC, the console inherits some functionality. Like the fast boot from Windows 10. Even without SDD, the console boots to an usable state from "Instant On" mode within
seconds. And even the "less powerful" Xbox One boots faster to an usable state than my own custom Core i7 with SSD.

Three things:

First, your and my custom built PC probably cost three or four times as much as the Scorpio will probably cost (and I'm guessing an US$500-600 price range). So of course the PC is more powerful than the Scorpio.

But I still play on my Xbox One, my Wii U or my Playstation (heck even my dated Dreamcast or Commodore 64), not for the processing power, but for it's simplicity.

On my PC I constantly have to haggle with drivers to coax my Oculus Rift to work properly. Hours a spent getting that hunk of silicone to get a game running because I have to fiddle with graphics settings, and whatnot. Then don't get me started about getting
people to talk to each other via Teamspeak, Discord or whatever.

On the Xbox One, I start the console, invite my friends to a party and we're in a multiplayer game within minutes, if not seconds.

Secondly: Read up on Hyper Threading. The amount of threads doesn't equal cores (no matter if logical or physical). It's just that a processor core can work on something else while it's waiting for another thread to fetch data from the "slow" RAM or something
like that. So while the single processor seems to be working on two threads like a dual core, it's still not like a second core. It's just that the waiting time is used to do something else.

And thirdly: The AMD APU is custom built and has an architecture that has not very much in common with an "off the shelf" processor. It really depends on what the purpose of the chip is, to make even a slowly clocked specialized chip excel at what a standard
CPU can do with a higher clock speed.

A PC processor has to run all kinds of software, be it video editing, AI computing, graphics rendering, business applications, while still carrying around the burden of the "old" processor architectures, so that in theory even old DOS Programs can run on
your modern PC. That old ballast is making your general purpose Core CPU in certain areas less effective than the finely tuned silicon that's specifically made for gaming calculations.

So a general purpose CPU is still slower than a specialized graphics processing unit with a slower clock speed. Or as the
.

Again: Of course there are custom built PCs with overclocked CPUs and ridiculous multi-SLI graphics cards that are faster than the Scorpio. But they cost A LOT more. Not only money, but also my nerves, when we are again unable to get a chat working or a
game is crashing because a Windows update broke some classic game's copy protection.

I'm 42, and as you can see from my post, I do care about specs. A lot. Probably a lot more than you. Which made me do this post. It's nice to be enthusiastic about something. But always remember, that there will be one, who is even more enthusiastic about
that thing... ;-)

You're confusing video resolution from streaming services with locally rendered resolution. 4K graphics in a game have nothing to do with Internet bandwith, unless you are using an on-demand streaming service like the now defunct "OnLive"
service or Playstation Now, which streams a video signal through the internet. Locally rendered games will have no problem running at 4K resolution, even if the console is connected through a Commodore 64 running with a 1200 baud analogue modem. Provided,
that the console/PC hardware is capable of rendering 4K in the first place.

As for the "poor-ish" 720p resolution, I doubt you'll detect the difference being "720p poor" and "721p OK". But I'll comment on that about the video below:

That video takes the wrong approach by comparing the amount of rods and cones with the digital pixel sensor of a camera. For example, if I invited you to my home, and sat you about 3 meters away from my secondary 32'' TV, your eyes would not be able to distinguish
the difference between 720p or 1080p. Whereas if I take you into my gaming room, where I use a video projector and 120'' screen, and would put you about 30 cm in front of the screen, you would be able to see the pixel difference from a 1080p image compared
to a 4k image, or even a 8K image (let's assume I do have a 8K capable projector and not a "standard" 1080p only projector). If I took you outdoors, and seated you 20 meters away from my 120'' screen, and projected a 480p DVD, a 1080p BluRay or a 4K UHD BluRay
on the screen, you would again be unable to tell the difference in resolution if I played a moving action sequence.

So instead of having the resolution of a human eye compared to the amount of pixels, a much better scale to measure eye resolution is the "Arcminute"

Look at
this article with the "viewing cone" to see what I mean. The farther away or the smaller your display is, the less likely it is that your eye can differentiate the resolution of the pixels.

So as fun as the video is, the video is explaining "eye resolution" wrong. Also other factors like the age of the lens in your eye, a disease or defect of the eye and other factors play into the eye's ability to "resolve" an image. So you usually don't ask
for the "resolution" of the human eye, but the Visual Acuity.

So, if we take a perfect human eye, the only two factors that come into play for your eyes to see the difference in resolution is the screen size and distance to the screen.

Now I'll go back to eating my sugar, shouting at all those Generation Y Millennial punks to get off my lawn, and patiently waiting for Scorpio to be released... ;-)

 

ArminatorX, upvoted two days ago, but curiously enough the OP hasn't checked back or addressed *anything* you've said. Funny that, because #daBOMB has a habit of running with his tail between his legs whenever he's been called out. I do believe #JusticeHasBeenServed.
Praise be!