343 Industries’ development director on the Halo franchise, Frank O’Connor, shared an interesting tidbit regarding Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox Scorpio.

　　As covered last week, Microsoft’s Project Scorpio project was spotted at AMD’s CES 2017 Ryzen/Vega Booth. It’s uncertain whether this has actually something to do with the Scorpio’s architecture, but it sure fueled speculation, including a hefty discussion on the NEOGAF forums.

　　Microsoft has yet to fully detail the Xbox Scorpio, and so far the company has only confirmed an eight-core CPU, more than 320GB/s of memory bandwidth and six teraflops of computing power. More details about the Scorpio will be unveiled later this year, but in the NEOGAF thread mentioned above, 343 Industries’ Frank O’Connor let slip an interesting Scorpio tidbit.

　　Haha, although I probably "know" in that I might have seen it in a slide or something, it's literally not something I have time to think about now and I actually couldn't remember whatever specs I've been exposed to even if I was tortured. I literally couldn't leak or answer a question that went beyond "Can I do this? Does it support that? How many of these could it render?"

　　What I do remember is that it's beefier than I expected.

　　Although not much to go by, O’Connor writes that he remembers the Xbox Scorpio to be “beefier” than he expected. The use of the term “beefier” could, of course, relate to the console’s hardware specifications, but could also refer to the console’s physical dimensions. Unfortunately, he didn’t clarify his wording, so at this point, it’s pure speculation on what he was referring to.

　　Last week, Microsoft's Xbox marketing manager, Aaron Greenberg, fueled up the Scorpio hype by stating that 2017 is the year of "Project Scorpio". "Are you ready for the beast!?", he Tweeted.

　　The Xbox Scorpio will release later this year, most probably during this year’s holiday season.