An Xbox X Series development kit has come to light from prolific tech youtuber, Gamer Nexus, who has managed to buy one. As you know, this is a special version of the console that the studios use for the video games development.
It is not usual for these types of versions to reach the general public. They can be found on sites like eBay, but they are quite expensive. are usually locked to play like the model that Gamers Nexus bought because they break the EULA license agreement and Microsoft bans them as soon as they connect to the Internet. But it helps us to approach these special models.
The Xbox X Series Development Kit, known as the XDK, closely resembles the kit for the Xbox One X (Project Scorpio). Previous rumors claimed that Microsoft used that design to prevent leaks before the official announcement in 2020. The commercial version of the console, as you know, has a completely different vertical design than the development version.
The kit at hand it is a version dated in 2020. It includes AMD’s APU codenamed “Scarlett”, with an 8-core AMD Zen2 architecture CPU and RDNA “Navi” graphics processing unit with 56 compute units. The specifications are likely to be common for the development and commercial versions, but there may be differences in the working frequencies.
40 GB for Xbox Series X Development Kit
The big change comes from the installed memory, since the development kit has a whopping 40 Gbytes, much higher than the 16 GB of the commercial version. If you follow us regularly, you will remember that it was rumored that the console for sale to the public would have more than the final 16 GB and this could be the reason.
The memory is manufactured by Samsung and is of the type GDDR6 at 14Gbps. What is not known is whether it is partitioned like in the commercial version, which has three pools allocated for the operating system, system memory, and graphics that take up the lion’s share of the total, 10 GB in the client version.
With this amount of memory being superlative, it must be said that it is usually common in development kits for debugging, chart data analysis, or detailed logging. Developers also need more memory to uncompress game builds and not burden other machine resources with such tasks.
Interesting, although it is likely that Microsoft has already delivered new generations of these kits if we take into account rumored tests with a new APU that will improve performance and energy efficiency. The Redmond firm, like Sony, must first solve a very serious problem that has been penalizing them since launch: unavailability of consoles.
