EDIT 1 (7:50PM EST on January 24rd 2017): An update from a Senior Editor for Xbox Section at Windows Central, claiming that he saw similar documents around E3 2016, not the same exact one though..
EDIT 2 (8:08PM EST on January 24rd 2017): Developer from Ori & the Blind Forest clarified some claims mentioned from Digital Foundries statements. It states the Xbox Scorpio is a full next-generational leap in the Xbox family that will support every prior Xbox One release.
All consoles now are x86 PCs and the architecture will remain the same, that’s why Sony was able to quickly iterate on the PS4 and make a beefier version of it. Scorpio is a next-gen machine with the added benefit that all your old games will still be compatible. From this point on, similar to PCs, you’ll not lose your library when you buy a next-gen system. I guess since NeoGAF is confused, Microsoft will need to do a little work to make it clear to everyone that Scorpio isn’t just a half-assed upgrade (which the PS4 Pro kinda is…), but a full blown next-gen machine that’s just backwards-compatible to your current library.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
Over just a month after the reveal at E3 2016, Eurogamer (DigitalFoundry) has gotten a developer’s whitepaper from Microsoft for the Xbox Scorpio, now while they talk about specs, it seems that the paper is not really filled with it, but we do know that: ESRAM is gone (But still required for Xbox One Original/S) and that arises from them that we will see a 3.5x power increase on the GPU power and 6TB bandwidth. The article also mentions that there will be a new method of performance increase called “framerate upscaling”, where it smoothes out a 30Hz on CPU but graphics at 60Hz with interpolated animation.
“ESRAM remains essential to achieving high performance on both Xbox One and Xbox One S,” the whitepaper reveals. “However, Project Scorpio and PC are not provided with ESRAM. Because developers are not allowed to ship a Project Scorpio-only SKU, optimising for ESRAM remains critical to performance on Microsoft platforms.”
“We acknowledge that developers may not wish to spend all of the additional GPU resource of Project Scorpio on resolution, and this is not mandated,” the paper says. “To make the best games possible, developers will inevitably spend GPU resource on other quality improvements such as higher fidelity shadows, reflections, texture filtering and lower draw distances. Another option developers might consider is frame-rate upscaling – running graphics at 60Hz but the CPU at 30Hz and interpolating animation.”
Please note that most of the information found is mostly speculation, as the whitepaper detailed do not include many information about the specifications of the console. You can go ahead and read it at Eurogamer.