A new rumor has popped up today concerning Microsoft's future plans for Xbox hardware. These rumors, backed by a few independent anonymous sources at Kotaku and Polygon, say that Microsoft will reveal that a "slim" Xbox One will be announced and released later this year. In addition, Microsoft is working on a new hardware revision that will bump the capabilities of the console to nearly four times the power of the current box. This new hardware revision is codenamed Scorpio and is expected to be released no earlier than late 2017.

Scorpio is expected to be announced in the coming months and seems as though it will go toe to toe with the also rumored PlayStation 4 Neo. If these rumors hold true, Scorpio will have roughly 6 TFLOPs of performance versus Neo's theoretical 4.14 TFLOPs.

Current Xbox One owners may not have to worry too much about the new hardware as the sources have said that compatibility between all of these Xbox One revisions is a key focus for the team. This ensures that games that run on Scorpio will also work on the original box and vice versa. Of course, Scorpio owners will have the benefit of performance and graphical enhancements that original owners will not get to experience. This is also right in line with what Sony is allegedly planning with the compatibility between the Neo and the regular PlayStation 4.

The Xbox One "Slim" will not feature much in the way of hardware upgrades with one notable exception. According to a report from The Verge, the Slim model will likely include 4K support for video playback. They also say that this will be the smallest Xbox ever made, with a reduction in size of 40% compared to the current Xbox One.

There have been no prices revealed for any of these rumored console upgrades. The only thing that is certain here is that if these rumors come true, the "gaming console" as we have known it for years will no longer exist. Gone will be the days where a single main hardware configuration would last consumers at least six years or more before a major new console was released. Faster, iterative upgrades every couple of years may now become the new norm.