Xbox Series X Dev Kit with 40 GB GDDR6 memory
Development kits for game consoles, as the name suggests, are only for game creators. Free sale is not permitted and results in hardware restrictions for the associated kits, preventing them from being utilized for gaming. In a deconstruction video, Gamers Nexus examined such an XDK and noted various differences from the Xbox Series X.
While PC game development gear is freely available from any developer firm, game consoles take a different approach. If you wish to build on a current Xbox, you must first obtain an Xbox Series X development kit from Microsoft.
These kits are not for sale and must be returned to Microsoft once the development work is completed. Every now and then, though, one of these development kits makes its way into the general market. One of these kits was acquired from the tech retailer Gamers Nexus and was shown in a detailed video.
The development kit, abbreviated as XDK, is set to be released in 2020 and is based on AMD's Scarlett APU, which, like the standard Xbox Series X, features eight Zen 2 cores and a Navi graphics unit with 56 compute units.
Only the clock rates can differ, which is difficult to verify. Unlike the retail model, which has 16 GB of combined graphics and working memory, the XDK includes 40 GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 14 Gbps.
The RAM in the Xbox Series X is split into 10 GB of graphics memory (320-bit), 3.5 GiB system memory (192-bit), and 2.5 GB for the operating system (192-bit). It's unknown whether the XDK has a similar category.
The XDK's bigger memory expansion is typically utilized for debugging and performance logs, while the game is calculated using the same expansion as the retail version of the console.
The XDK also includes a 10-Gbit LAN connection for speedier build import, a USB-C interface, and an inbuilt monitor for performance measurements and debugging. Despite the fact that the XDK costs more than $1,350, Microsoft has banned it on the hardware side, rendering it unusable and allowing only Gamers Nexus' Steve Burke to tear it down in his video.
