Xbox Series X



"Power Your Dreams"

The Xbox Series X is the fridge successor to the Xbox One. It's Backwards compatible with all Xbox One software and hardware. This includes all Xbox 360 and Original Xbox games that are compatible with Xbox One. So a lack of games on day one won't be a issue. Certain Xbox 360 and Original Xbox titles will include Xbox Series X enhancements like smoother framerates and HDR.

Specs

 * CPU: Project Scarlett SoC with 8 Cores based on AMD Zen 2 architecture on a 7nm process
 * Runs at 3.8GHz with hyper-threading off and 3.6GHz with hyper-threading on (8 cores/16 threads). No Boost Mode or Clock.
 * GPU: 12 TFLOPs, 52 CUs at 1.825GHz, Custom RDNA 2. Again, No Boost Mode or Clocks.
 * The GPU will support 8k Resolutions, real-time hardware powered ray-tracing (via DirectX), Variable Rate Shading, and up to 120fps in games
 * Memory: 16GB GDDR6
 * Memory will run at 10GB @ 560 GB/s, 6GB @ 336 GB/s
 * Storage: 1TB custom NVMe SSD
 * Input: 3 USB 3.2 ports. One on the front, two on the back
 * Includes support for external HDD and internal HDD expansion.
 * Optical drive: 4K UHD Blu-ray

here's what says from Wikipedia
The Xbox Series X and Series S (collectively, the Xbox Series X/S) are home video game consoles developed by Microsoft. They were both released on November 10, 2020 as the fourth generation of the Xbox console family, succeeding the Xbox One family.

Rumors regarding the consoles first emerged in early 2019, with the line as a whole codenamed "Scarlett", and consisting of high-end and low-end models codenamed "Anaconda" and "Lockhart" respectively. The high-end model was first teased during E3 2019 under the title "Project Scarlett", while its name and design as Xbox Series X was unveiled during The Game Awards later in December. In September 2020, Microsoft unveiled the low-end model as Xbox Series S.

Microsoft is prioritizing hardware performance, including support for higher display resolutions (up to 8K resolution) along with high frame rates, real-time ray tracing, and use of a high-speed solid-state drive to reduce loading times, on the Xbox Series X. The Xbox Series S uses the same CPU and reduced GPU, memory, and internal storage and lacks an optical drive.

Microsoft is promoting a gamer-centric approach to their new hardware, including free upgrades which are enhanced versions of Xbox One games via their "Smart Delivery" initiative, games optimized for the Series X hardware, and backward compatibility with previous generation Xbox games, controllers and accessories. The console will also take advantage of their game subscription service Xbox Game Pass, as well as remote cloud gaming on mobile devices via their cloud game-streaming platform xCloud.

Contents

 * 1History
 * 1.1Initial unveiling and launch
 * 2Hardware
 * 2.1Xbox Series X
 * 2.2Xbox Series S
 * 2.3Common features
 * 2.3.1Storage architecture
 * 2.3.2Video and audio rendering technologies
 * 2.4Comparison
 * 2.5Controller and accessories
 * 3System software and features
 * 4Games
 * 4.1Backward compatibility
 * 5Release
 * 6Reception
 * 7See also
 * 8Notes
 * 9References

Initial unveiling and launch
Industry rumors of new Xbox hardware had started as early as June 2018, with Microsoft's Phil Spencer confirming they were "deep into architecturing the next Xbox consoles" at that time. The hardware was believed to be a family of devices under the codename "Scarlett", including a low-cost version, with major emphasis on game streaming and backward compatibility. By March 2019, further industry rumors had led to speculation of two consoles under the Scarlett family under codenames "Anaconda" and the low-cost "Lockhart" version.

Microsoft confirmed Project Scarlett at its E3 2019 press conference. Microsoft said they wanted a "soft" transition from Xbox One to Scarlett, with Scarlett supporting backward compatibility with all games and most hardware supported on the Xbox One. During a presentation at The Game Awards 2019, Microsoft officially revealed the design of Scarlett and its branding, "Xbox Series X", as well as a late-2020 release date. Following the event, a Microsoft spokesperson stated that Xbox Series X constituted an entry in a fourth generation of Xbox hardware, which will be branded simply as "Xbox" with no subtitle.

Microsoft planned to go into detail into the hardware specifications and launch games for the Series X at both the 2020 Game Developers Conference (GDC) and E3 2020, but both events were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Microsoft scheduled online presentations over the same planned days in March 2020, while the company will schedule its planned E3 presentation at a later time. Detailed specifications were presented by Microsoft, Digital Foundry and Austin Evans of Overclock Media on March 16, 2020. Starting in May and running until launch, Microsoft planned to have additional digital events around the Xbox Series X and its games as part of an "Xbox 20/20" series. This included an Xbox Games Showcase on July 23, 2020, featuring games principally from its first-party Xbox Game Studios.

On July 16, 2020, Microsoft announced that it had ended production of the Xbox One X and all-digital version of the Xbox One S in preparation for the new products.

The existence of the Xbox Series S had been speculated prior to the E3 2019 reveal based on a "Project Lockhart" that accompanied Scarlett, a second lower-end console. Confirmation of the Xbox Series S naming was affirmed through early Xbox hardware accessories that some had been able to purchase. Microsoft officially announced the Series S console on September 8, 2020, revealing that it would also be released alongside the Series X in November 2020. Microsoft pointed out that the Series S had been discretely placed in the background of previous Xbox announcement videos featuring Phil Spencer during July 2020.

Hardware
When Microsoft's Xbox team started work on the successor to the Xbox One consoles around 2016, they had already envisioned the need to have two console versions similar to their Xbox One X and Xbox One S models to meet the needs of different markets. By developing both units in concert, they would be able to make sure games developed would be able to be played on both systems without exception. As has been tradition with past Xbox projects, the consoles were given code names based on cities. The Xbox Series S was named Project Lockhart, based on the city of Lockhart, Texas, which Alan Greenberg said was known as "the little city with the big heart".

For the high end target, the Xbox Series X, their primary goal was to at least double the graphical performance of the Xbox One X as measured by its floating point operations per second (FLOPS), and increasing CPU performance four-fold compared to Xbox One X while maintaining the same acoustic performance from the Xbox One consoles. As the engineers collected power requirements to meet these specifications, they saw these parts would draw a large amount of internal power (approximately 315 W) and would generate a significant amount of heat.

This led to the decision to split the components onto two separate circuit boards; one housing the CPU/GPU, memory, and power regulators, and a second board to act as a Southbridge board for slower input/output (I/O) functions. The boards mounted on opposite sides of an aluminum chassis helped to create air channels for cooling. The remaining components - the heat sink, the electric shielding, the power supply, the optical drive, and the cooling fan were then arranged in a Tetris-like fashion, according to principal designer Chris Kujawski, to achieve a compact form factor, resulting in the tower-like structure. To meet the acoustics factor, the system includes numerous sensors for controlling the speed of the fan, and the large open top was necessary to assure good air flow through the system. While certain elements like the optical drive, air flow requirements, and heat sink size fixed certain dimensions in the overall form factor, they were satisfied they were able to end up with a square footprint for the unit.

Xbox Series X
Xbox head Phil Spencer stated that Microsoft was prioritizing high frame rates and faster load times as a priority over higher resolutions, which the Series X achieves via the better-matched capabilities of the CPU and GPU.

The Xbox Series X is powered by a custom 7 nm AMD Zen 2 CPU with eight cores running at a nominal 3.8 GHz, or when simultaneous multithreading (SMT) is used, at 3.6 GHz. One CPU core is dedicated to the underlying operating system. The graphics processing unit is also a custom unit based on AMD's RDNA 2 graphics architecture. It has a total of 56 compute units (CUs) with 3584 cores, with 52 CUs and 3328 cores enabled, and will be running at a fixed 1.825 GHz. This unit is capable of 12.15 teraflops of computational power. The unit ships with 16GB of GDDR6 SDRAM, with 10GB running at 560GB/s primarily to be used with the graphics system and the other 6GB at 336GB/s to be used for the other computing functions. After accounting for the system software, approximately 13.5GB of memory will be available for games and other applications, with the system software only drawing from the slower pool. The Xbox Series X target performance is to render games at 4K resolution at 60 frames per second, with the console being about four times as powerful as the Xbox One X. The Series X can support up to 120 frames per second, and can render up to 8K resolution.

The Xbox Series X's console form is designed to be unobtrusive and minimalistic. It has a 15.1 cm × 15.1 cm (5.9 in × 5.9 in) footprint and is 30.1 cm (11.9 in) high and weighs 4.45 kg (9.8 lb); while configured in this vertical orientation, the unit can also be used on its side. Its forward-facing features present only the main power button and an Ultra HD Blu-ray drive. The top of the unit is a single powerful fan. Spencer stated that the console is as quiet as Xbox One X. The Series X includes an HDMI 2.1 output, the storage expansion slot, three USB 3.1 ports, and an ethernet port. The console does not include an infrared blaster or HDMI pass-through like the Xbox One line, supporting HDMI-CEC instead. An earlier leak had suggested a TOSLINK port for digital audio, but this was eliminated in the final design.

Xbox Series S
The Xbox Series S is comparable in its hardware to the Xbox Series X, similar to how the Xbox One S relates to the Xbox One X, but has less processing power. While it runs the same CPU with slightly slower clock frequencies, it uses a slower GPU, a custom RDNA2 with 20 CUs at 1.55 GHz for 4 TFLOPS, compared to 12 TFLOPS of the Series X. It ships with 10 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD storage unit with a raw input/output throughput of 2.4GB/s, and does not include any optical disc drive, thus requiring the user to gain all software from digital distribution. It is intended to render games nominally at 1440p, with support for a 4K upscaler, at 60 frames per second, although it can go as high at 120 frames per second at this resolution. Otherwise, the console has the same functions as the Xbox Series X, including ports, expansions, and game support.

Microsoft designed the Series S to easily fit inside of a small bag or backpack for portability and travel usage. The Series S unit is about 60% smaller by volume than the Series X, measuring 275 by 151 by 63.5 millimetres (10.83 in × 5.94 in × 2.50 in) in its vertical orientation. In this orientation, its large side surface features the major exhaust port for active air cooling, similar to the top surface of the Series X; additional vents are then located on the top of the Series S. The front features one USB connection and a headphone jack. The rear of the console includes the power connector, one HDMI port, two additional USB ports, and an Ethernet port. Like the Series X, the Series S can also be placed horizontally with the exhaust port facing upward to maintain airflow. The Series S will launch in a matte white case along with a matching controller, distinguishing it from the matte black that the Series X will use.

Storage architecture
The Xbox Velocity Architecture logo Both consoles use a new storage solution, the Xbox Velocity Architecture, that includes hardware and software components to improve transfer speeds within the console, reduce the size of digital downloads, and give developers more flexibility. Central to this is the internal storage, a custom NVM Express (NVMe) SSD. On the Series X, this is a 1 TB SSD (802 GB available) with a raw input/output throughput of 2.4 GB/s. An on-board compression/decompression block includes both the industry standard zlib decompression algorithm and a proprietary BCPack algorithm geared for game textures, and gives a combined throughput as high as 4.8 GB/s. Within the software, a new DirectStorage API within DirectX allows developers to fine-tune priority to input/output aspects with other processing threads. The software provides sampler feedback streaming that aids in loading multiple textures in segments to deal with level of detail rendering rather than having to read these textures as a whole before using them. The Series S will include a 512 GB SSD (364 GB available) with similar custom hardware and software specifications. All SSD storage on the architecture uses PCI Express 4.0.

Developers at The Coalition found that without any changes to their code, Gears 5 loaded four times faster on Xbox Series X than Xbox One X due to the higher throughput on memory and storage, and would be able to increase this further once they incorporated the new DirectStorage API routines.

The consoles will support external storage through a proprietary SSD expansion card inserted into the back of the console, which will be manufactured exclusively by Seagate Technology on launch and limited to a 1 TB size, though a 2 TB version is planned later. As with Xbox One, the consoles will also support external USB storage, but only backward compatible games (which can also be transferred directly from an Xbox One console) will be able to run directly from external USB storage. Xbox Series S and Series X-native games must be stored on the internal SSD or an expansion card in order to be played, but can be moved to a USB storage device to save disk space for other games..