Now there is a bit of nuance here, as AMDs GPU architecture is offered piecemeal: the shader cores, the memory controllers, the display controllers, etc are all separate blocks that can be mixed and matches. This is how the PS4 Pro uses just parts of Vega. So its entirely possible that there are other bits and pieces in Scorpio that are newer than Polaris, however the all-important shader cores and ROP backends clearly point to Polaris.
Diving into the specs a bit deeper, we do have the clockspeeds and configurations for both the GPU and the memory. Scorpios GPU is a 40 CU (2,560 SP) wide design a bit wider than the Radeon RX 480 which is a rather extensive upgrade over the original Xbox One. Ignoring clockspeeds for the moment (more in a sec), just the CU count itself is 3.33 times the 12 CUs in the original XB1. Similarly, Microsoft has doubled the number of ROP backends from 16 to 32. The ROP change is badly needed in order for Microsoft to reach their 4K goal, and it has been a pretty universal suspicion that the original XB1s 16 ROPs were a big part of the reason that major multiplatform games tend to go with 900p instead of a native 1080p.
Meanwhile on the clockspeed front, the new GPU is clocked at 1172MHz, giving Microsoft 6 TFLOPS right on the dot. This is a 37% clockspeed increase over the original XB1, and a 28% increase over the XB1S, which received a slight clockspeed bump of its own. These clockspeeds are well within the range of what the Polaris architecture can offer, and while not as conservative as Sonys design choices, should still be reasonably power efficient, though Im very much interested in seeing what total power consumption is like.
More importantly, combined with the much wider GPU, the impact to the various throughput metrics is staggering. Shader/texture throughput will be 4.58x the original XB1, and ROP throughput will be 2.75x. Microsoft had a very large gap to close from the original Xbox One if they wanted to do 4K, and they have certainly put together a design that is equally large to help close that gap. However with that said, with performance that, on paper, is slightly ahead of a Radeon RX 480, I expect were still going to see some compromises here to consistently hit Microsofts 4K goal. 6 TFLOPS often isnt enough for native 4K at current image quality levels, which means developers will have to resort to some clever optimizations or image scaling.
