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AMD admits using fake Xbox Series X render in its CES 2020 press conference

Surely AMD and Microsoft are friendly enough to share promo shots... except the red team still used a fake Xbox render at CES 2020

Xbox Series X VRS support

You’d think if you were creating the beating silicon heart of the new Xbox Series X that you might be able to encourage your client to give you a few publicity pics for your own CES 2020 sizzle reel, right? Well, turns out Microsoft hadn’t supplied AMD with any new renders of the next-gen console, despite a bunch of sites getting excited about what was shown of the device during AMD’s CES press conference.

Yup, AMD used a fake Xbox Series X render in its promo vid at CES last night, and wasn’t actually giving us all our first real look at a 360° shot of Microsoft’s next big thing. Seriouly BIG THING. I mean, look at it, that thing’s huge.

The offending video clip has been removed from the on-demand version of the AMD’s CES presentation, and replaced by some stock footage of the E3 reveal of then Project Scarlett and the more recent Series X unveiling. AMD has also come clean about the images it created for the press conference, admitting that it grabbed the render from a repository site called TurboSquid.com. A site that’s probably seeing quite a spike in traffic at the moment…

“The Xbox Series X imagery used during the AMD CES press conference was not sourced from Microsoft and does not accurately represent the design or features of the upcoming console,” an AMD spokesperson has said to The Verge. “They were taken from TurboSquid.com.”

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Before that admission the interwebs were awash with all the intricate details the sight of the Xbox Series X render seemed to impart. Namely that it might have some USB ports, a couple of HDMI ports, and a goddam ethernet port of all things. I know, right.

We should have all known that it was a fake render immediately as it’s got a plug socket in the back of the console suggesting an internal PSU. However much Microsoft is making the Xbox just a limited PC there’s surely no way it would go the whole hog and stick the power supply inside the box. Shirley.

How would you squeeze a PSU capable of supplying the power to a GPU with the 56 compute units reportedly inside the Xbox Series X’s graphics silicon?

Oh yeah, you make the chassis massive…

Ryzen 4000 APU

Whatever, apart from that slight console-related faux pas AMD’s CES 2020 press conference went down a storm, introducing the first monolithic versions of the Zen 2 architecture in the Renoir APUs, as well as the last word (for now) in 1080p graphics cards… the Radeon RX 5600 XT.

Oh, and some 64-core Threadripper desktop chip that is currently making everyone in our video department drool.