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XBox (Games) Entertainment Games

Xbox 2 Architecture Documented, Almost 2004-Launched? 100

Posted by simoniker from the pretty-diagrams dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Over at Xbit Labs, they seem to have new information on the Xbox 2 hardware specs, evidently originating from China, although the date and veracity of the document can't be confirmed. Noteworthy is the inclusion of (3) 3.5GHz CPUs [some say a 3-core CPU?], only 10 MB of dedicated graphics memory, and the undecided comments on whether the hard drive is 'built in'. The high speed bus to the GPU and the small amount of video memory point directly at Microsoft's upcoming DirectX Next, which will supposedly feature virtual graphics memory." Elsewhere, Gamaroo writes "Gamesindustry.biz is reporting that Microsoft originally wanted to release Xbox 2 for Christmas 2004. However, the new system has since slipped from schedule, but the piece claims Microsoft hopes to release the new console in mid-2005, to get ' a full year's head-start on Sony's PS3, and possibly even more'."
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Xbox 2 Architecture Documented, Almost 2004-Launched? More

Xbox 2 Architecture Documented, Almost 2004-Launched?

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  • 3.5GHz by this Christmas? By next year? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 2nd Post! ( 213333 ) <gundbear@pacbe l l .net> on Monday April 26, 2004 @06:46PM (#8977643) Homepage
    Pshaw. Not that they won't exist, but at what prices?

    Unless they are *severely* stripped G5s, I wouldn't expect much past 2.5GHz in these things.

    Why? Because price, because complexity, because benefits! Now if these aren't 64bit CPUs, but 3 32bit PPC+VMX from IBM... okay, and that would be perfect for IBM to pop into iBooks as well :D
    • Hehe, another thought springs to mind though.

      They could release a desktop workstation with three of these dual core 65nm PPC 976s with VirtualPC and make a killing!
    • Although I am also sceptical, they do mention in the article that the processors would be manufactored at .065 microns. If the manufactoring process was in place I could see the chips becoming a reality...

    • Re:3.5GHz by this Christmas? By next year? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @06:58PM (#8977767) Homepage Journal
      "Unless they are *severely* stripped G5s, I wouldn't expect much past 2.5GHz in these things."

      It's hard to say. Microsoft might be willing to take an embarrasing loss on these systems just to beat Sony to market. They're a big enough company, they'll risk it. It'd either reallly pay off or really be a huge loss. Hard to say. Frankly, I'm not sure that Sony's being first to market was everything to their success. Afterall, Dreamcast beat them there, and graphically it wasn't substantially inferior to the PS2. They were still eclipsed pretty fast.

      • "Dreamcast beat them there, and graphically it wasn't substantially inferior to the PS2" Wasn't 'substantially inferior'? Mod troll down! Have you seen gereration 1 ps2 games next to what the dreamcast had at the time? The Dreamcast's grahpics whooped the ps2s ass. Its only the last year or so that the development kits have improved to the point where developers can bring out the best out of the ps2. You underestimate the Dreamcast. It didnt fail because of its graphics. It failed because of its past repu
        • I have no idea why you thought I was bashing the Dreamcast. On a technical level, it does have inferior hardware, that really can't be argued. I agree, it had better graphics, it didn't have the stupid bottlenecks that the PS2 has.

          As for it's failure, no it had little (or nothing) to do with Sega's support of the system. It did have to do with Sega not having the money to keep producing systems. Heartbreaking, really. I think it'd still be around today if not for that.
      • It's hard to say. Microsoft might be willing to take an embarrasing loss on these systems just to beat Sony to market. They're a big enough company, they'll risk it.

        Correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft has sold exactly zero systems in the market at a profit. I recall some big hubbub about them losing money on every system purchased back when they were new, and the price has come down by an order of magnitude since then.

        I think history is about to repeat itself. With a larger market saturation and
        • Yes, but using commodidty parts the price is costs them to produce a system has also dropped. I wouldn't be surprised if they've scaled the price down to match their system costs, so things almost break even.

          Of course, no commodity parts in this next one, which means its more expensive and harder to program. Thoguh now they do have more experience with manufacturing, so if the PS2 can go at cost or under, then maybe the Xbox can too.
          • Although I'm sure the cost to produce an Xbox has dropped somewhat, using commodity parts hurts them more then helps them.

            Look at Sony's case. The chips are mostly made in-house. As Moore's law progresses, the chips get smaller and easier to make. Or better yet, multiple chips can be integrated into one chip. All of the savings are enjoyed by Sony.

            Using commodity parts means the savings is split between the supplier and the Microsoft. How this split is done depends on negotiations between the parties.

    • Re:3.5GHz by this Christmas? By next year? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Not that they won't exist, but at what prices?

      My rough guess:

      (1) Not being sold by Apple (read: ripped off by Apple) automatically decreases the retail price by a factor of at least 2. A $300 CPU becomes $150. This rule of thumb works when comparing any Apple product to PC compatible products of similar performance.

      (2) Bulk discounts apply to large volume pricing. They'll also have extremely low profit margins. A $150 CPU becomes $75 in the raw cost to manufacture.

      (3) Surface mounted versions of CPUs f

  • Headstart? Just like sega! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Captain Rotundo ( 165816 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @06:57PM (#8977758) Homepage
    THe headstart means nothing without a completely killer app. The dreamcast beat sony by a year and it was twelves months of people saying "I'll wait and see what sony comes out with" not because they couldn't afford more than one system over the year, but because there was no killer that every one had to have (Halo, MGS, Zelda, etc).

    What either MS or Nintendo have to do is come out with there systems with some very nice launch or near launch games, and heavily push a good line up. thats the only chance they have in the next round.

    Of course I didn't own any of the current gen systems till I got a GameCube back in december, so I really am not the best to comment on console systems :)

    • Re:Headstart? Just like sega! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:19PM (#8977953)
      THe headstart means nothing without a completely killer app. The dreamcast beat sony by a year and it was twelves months of people saying "I'll wait and see what sony comes out with" not because they couldn't afford more than one system over the year, but because there was no killer that every one had to have (Halo, MGS, Zelda, etc).

      The dreamcast's US launch went way better than expected - $110M in the first 3 days, retail.

      "While one week's sales do not make a system a success, Dreamcast is off to an excellent start,"

      - Ed Roth, president of NPD Leisure Activities
      September, 1999

      And software sales (or piracy for that matter) were not why the dreamcast failed - Sega would not have dropped it to go exclusively into the software biz if that were the case. Nope, Dreamcast failed for one simple reason - Sega launched it while the company was in debt. No console can be sustained without massive cash reserves, not in a market where multinational corporations are competing. Sony and Microsoft can afford to sell their consoles at a loss. So can Nintendo, to a lesser degree. Sega, post-Saturn, could not.

      Xbox 2 will do just fine, because Microsoft is backing it. Microsoft is not Sega. That is the crucial difference.

    • Re:Headstart? Just like sega! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:56PM (#8978233) Homepage
      The difference is MS could afford to launch the console at some special price (say $200, or $300 but that includes one game) for only 6 months. That would get them tons of sales (WAY ahead of current consoles, and cheaper than the PS3 should be) which could get them off to the head start they need. This combined with a few killer games at launch (with only Halo, MS struggled with the X-Box) and they could get a MAJOR foothold in the market and force Sony to fight them all the way. Microsoft can afford to take a large hit upfront for profit later, while Sega had to try to stay proffitable (or as close as possible) the whole time.

      When entering a new market MS can learn VERY fast. Don't underestimate them with this next launch, this could be where they try to move from trailing Sony and Nintendo to moving into the left lane and FLOORING IT to win.

      • Re:Headstart? Just like sega! (Score:5, Funny)

        by MMaestro ( 585010 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @11:43PM (#8979848)
        Don't underestimate them with this next launch, this could be where they try to move from trailing Sony and Nintendo to moving into the left lane and FLOORING IT to win.

        If MS tried to do that Sony would just hit the speed booster on the stage and Nintendo would just switch drivers to hit whoever's in the lead with red turtle shells.

      • This discussion is full with positive comments on Microsoft, so Slashdot unlike.
      • The difference is MS could afford to launch the console at some special price (say $200, or $300 but that includes one game) for only 6 months.

        I remember reading somewhere thast MS's original plan for the XBox was to sell it at a premium for the early adapters who would buy it at any price, and then drop the price a few months later when manufacturing prices had dropped so as to not lose too much money. With no compition this time around I think they may try this tactic.

        Also, if MS does sell the XBox2

    • Umm, the DC had the best launch ever when it was released.

      As for its not beating out Sony, Sega had pissed off a lot of fans with the Segs CD and 32x, and then again with the Saturn. These people had latched onto the PS1 and were waiting for the PS2. Also, Sony had squat for the launch of the PS2, it was a whole lot of "Cool ive got a PS2, now when does Grand Tourismo come out?"

      • Again, launch is meaningless. It's almost a LAW that a console will sell it's allotment at launch. Period. Sega got a lot of units into the marketplace, but without software to make up the losses, they were doomed to failure AGAIN.

  • I'm putting my money on "no". (Score:3, Insightful)

    by silentbobdp ( 157345 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:00PM (#8977779) Homepage
    Now, I know MS has been eating a loss, but the things that are being talked about for this thing are ridiculous.

    They are not going to put 3 3.5ghz G5s in there. Not unless they want it to be the size of a tower to fit stuff in there to cool it.

    The things people believe these days are really amusing.

    • There are other things to consider.... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If microsoft has a license to produce the chips, and hires IBM to do it, they won't necessarily pay a premium, and IBM gets essentially an enormous subsidy to their chip making and don't have to worry about competition unless people figure out how to make clusters of Xbox2's. With some of the heat transport techniques, and the thermal properties of the G5, it's within the realm of realistic.

      Either way, there are Sony excutives that are concerned about the development.
    • 3 3.5 Ghz Chips.

      This wouldn't even fit right in a mid-tower. On top of that...how the hell are you going to cool this? And what unheard of power supply are you going to have in this?

      Furthermore...even pricing these at say what a present day Intel 2.8Ghz chip costs...that's like freaking $900 of CPU right there. You honestly don't think someone isn't going to figure out how to bust that puppy open strip out the CPUs and start using them for other non X-Box purposes if you sell the console at $300-$400?
      • I'm sorry, 3 3.5GHz chips wouldn't fit in a mid tower? That's based on the assumption that your system will have a bunch of empty space as the common PC does. A game console does not have a bunch of empty space. You could cool such a system using a combination of heat pipes and fans.

        With that said, this document probably is a bunch of crap.

    • Re:I'm putting my money on "no". (Score:5, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday April 26, 2004 @07:36PM (#8978071) Homepage Journal
      I don't read the diagram the way you do. All three blocks labeled "CPU" are in the same box. In my book, that makes it a three-core CPU. That still sounds expensive but not nearly as expensive as three CPUs.

      There is no way that Microsoft would put three CPUs in a game console because of the dramatically increased cost.

      If you did such a thing, then you could have only one coprocessor if you wished. I dunno about G5, never looked at the documentation, but in the G4 altivec was handled via a coprocessor. Or you could eliminate it entirely. In the PS2, a single MIPS core was used as your main CPU, and the vector processors were packaged into the same, well, package, presumably on the same die. That was essentially three CPUs in a single package, though they ran at only ~300MHz.

      With all that said, I don't believe that they're going to put one 3.5GHz G5 in there. However, perhaps they're planning for the system to be able to reach such clock rates. I might believe a three-core, ~1.5GHz processor, with faster parts being used later for derivatives of the same system, though I don't see how anything you could do with a game console would take more than three 1.5GHz processors, unless perhaps you were using it as a PVR and doing realtime DVD-resolution (let alone HDTV-resolution) encoding using the CPUs and not some dedicated hardware video codec.

      I think that a single 1.5GHz two-core processor is much more likely than any of this shit; Since the processor is know to be coming from IBM it is presumably a fast G4 or some form of G5. Since IBM is all about multiple cores right now (it being perhaps an easier way to increase performance than improving clock speed) it only makes sense that a multiple-core powerpc processor will find its way into Xbox. The question now becomes, how many cores and what clock rate?

      Certainly, a random gif from china does not prove anything, but it does provide food for thought. The only problem is, none of these thoughts are going to be particularly original...

  • 65 nm CPUs? Puh-leeze. (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    IBM is having enough trouble [eedesign.com] at 90 nm. They're shipping chips, but not in the sorts of volume they were aiming at (why else would Apple be shipping the Xserve G5 in relatively small numbers, and not have announced updates to the PowerMac G5?)

    65 nm promises to be a similar order of magnitude of problems. I'm not convinced, and I won't be until I see more details on what problems have been encountered in the rush to 65 nm, and how they were overcome.

    • MS can afford to give (buy) ibm's effort for $5billion, (spare change really), if it means nintendo dies into nothing more than a kiddie toy as good as a wrist watch and ps3 dies coz it would be lame ass, and 100x harder to program for compared to DX10 or something. Remember if it takes 3x coders and 2x time to make a game, game houses will dump the ps3. Every 4 years its a new ball game.

      Who knows in 2010, someone else with $10b to spare could kickass, but without both terrific software and everything that
      • However if MS wins, the gaming industry will be dead within a decade. Sony won't stick around in the Americas, they came into the industry because it had finally been proven profitable by Nintendo and Sega, they're very much a fair weather company.

        Which will leave us solely with Microsoft and no competition. This is the company that had the balls to release Windows ME, and only cleaned up their OS act(and actually still hasn't, since Windows(yes, even XP) is still complete and total Shit) when faced with

  • Software, Software, Software. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You will win the battle by offering an experience on your console that is highly desirable and can't be played anywhere else. Next-gen hardware is just a way to hedge your bets in that area.

    It's been said before, and it'll be said until they come up with a catchier phrase- it's software that drives this thing.

    Every target market teenager I know who bought a PS2 to play GTA III doesn't know the hardware difference between the PS2 and the Xbox any more than they know who the President is.

    Bleeding edge har
    • So so so true. The other thing is, Microsoft has been a much better service to their developers than Sony. The dev tools allowed to you are SO much better on the Xbox than PS2 (break-recompile-restart on a console? Awesome! Plus a handy shader debugger to boot). Not to mention the test-kits/dev-kits are almost identical except for a DVD emulator SCSI port, and the fact they're a lot cheaper.

      Sony has gotten better, but Microsoft was better from the first hardware release. I don't expect this situation

  • How fast does a console need to be before increases in performance simply make for no visual improvement on a TV's crappy resolution? It seems there has to be some point of diminishing returns. Will real-time raytracing take over, eventually? Or will everyone be laughing at me still holding onto my 15 year old monophonic TV while they all have HTDV and THX waking up the dead in China?
    • We'll get there, but we're not there now. We're still at a point where more power can mean deformable objects (when someone/something gets shot, it actually gets damage instead of just a dark spot on it), more objects (who needs a cheesy grass texture when you can simulate the individual BLADES), or dynamic textures (drive your Jeep through mud and it gets muddy. But the mud is different each time, like in real life) etc. This will all be great for cinematics and such.

      The other great thing about more CPU i

      • Tetris? It's been said before. Tetris is a totally unrealistic game.
      • "think a swarm of hundreds of bees, where each bee has it's own AI, they are not just a clump)"

        Surely you mean hundreds of thousand? Bees aren't all that intelligent and besides most of them would probably be in the hive tending to the queen.

        A few hundred bees flying around collecting nectar from a few hundred flowers, occasionally swarming wouldn't really be that stressful on a PS2, even as a background thing.

        per-polygon hit detection isn't too hard as long as you don't have too many polygons.
        • per-polygon hit detection isn't too hard as long as you don't have too many polygons.

          True enough. I think Painkiller actually does it.

          Still, considering that the discussion is about such realism that your TV can no longer tell the difference, I suspect we're talking about a hella lot of poly's.
    • HDTV will be a big, big factor.

      The prices are coming down fast. Personally, I wish every game played at 1080i- but unfortunately, only a handful (4 I believe) play at that resolution.

      I want to see my HDTV do something other than 480p- so the next console better be able to push that resolution, without any problems.

      Also, I want everything to load faster, and load bigger. I don't want a 30 second load everytime I use an elevator in Deus Ex: Invisible War.

      I want graphics that rival a PC, and not just on
      • Hopefully the goal for all 3 next-gen systems is to allow 1080i with multisampling antialiasing and 64bit pixels (16bit floating point colour channels for high dynamic range). Beyond the inherent coolness of this for those of us with HDTVs there is the side benefit that, because 1080i is widescreen only, more games will support 16:9 widescreen.

        Xbox is the only current system with enough memory to go over 480p and it doesn't really have the fillrate to make 720p or 1080i worthwhile unless you have simplisti
    • 10.5 GHz? It doesn't work that way. But the fact is that until video games look as good as television, and they are not anywhere near there now, there will be more room for improvement in your game console than your television.
      • 10.5 GHz? It doesn't work that way.

        Okay (10.5GHz - epsilon) for inefficiency in SMP. Still, such a configuration potentially has 15 times the computational power relative to the pared-down Celeron in the XBox. PPC is generally a stronger architecture than Celeron/Pentium III, unless Microsoft neuters them in an effort to make the next XBox affordable. Couple that with decent graphics and sound subsystems, and the next XBox could very well be at least 30 times faster than my current desktop computer (ye
  • And they said the hard drive was too expensive

    • Re:3 cored CPU eh? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Hard drives typically only become bigger, not cheaper, over the consoles life time. The processors can be moved to a cheaper process, the die size reduced, they can be redesigned to improve yield etc. In the long run this makes a big difference in console manufacturing cost.

      As an example, originally the PS2 had separate chips for the cpu, the vector units and the graphics chip. Over time, Sony have migrated all of these to a single die on a newer process. This means significantly lower costs for Sony.
    • no fool,

      MTBF is high on HDs, they crap out

      multiply 0.01% failure rate * 15 million HDs and you have alot of badass dead machines.
  • Why 3 (CPU's or cores)? All modern hardware seems to do things in power of two, for obvious reasons (largest number of components for a given address space). Many algorithms are simplest to express if they operate on data sets with 2^n elements. So why does Microsoft go the odd route?

    My guess, just based on numerology, is that this is a fake or a joke.
  • The article calls it the "Xenon"...? Didn't Microsoft already say they're calling it the XBox Next? Not to mention Xenon is a terrible name and will probably be rampantly mispronounced.
    • No, in fact quite the opposite -- Xenon is the offical codename (keep in mind, *codename*, not the real name, just as xbox was codenamed "Project Midway" and the Gamecube was codenamed "Dolphin")

      and on the other side, the XboxNext name is a rumor. completely unconfirmed and pulled out of some reporter's ass.

  • it could be real, but who knows? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 26, 2004 @08:56PM (#8978612)
    Couple bullets for the speculative monkeys...

    - It's *likely* not 3 CPUs but one CPU with 3 cores (each with it's own L1 cache).

    - at 65 nanometers the cpu will cost less to manufacture than even the current 180nm XBOX CPU. (assuming the transistor count is less than 3x)

    - 3.5 GHz is a conservative speed for a 65 nanometer CPU. It will still require active cooling (i.e. a fan on the heatsink) but it should be able to run RELATIVELY cool at that speed if the 65nm process tech is good. Note that intel will be running 65nm chips at 5+ Ghz in the same timeframe (2005).

    - lastly the dude going on about the virtual graphics memory... I don't know how you figured that had something to do with broadband, but it doesn't. It's a feature of DirectX 10.

    This document looks reasonable, albeit old... because MS has likely known their harddisk plan for many months... so if it was a recent doc... it would have finalized the HD info.

    Between the super powerful CPU and wicked fast graphics courtesy of ATI's custom R500... both the Xenon and the PS3 will be close enough in technology and performance people should really be choosing the system based on the games. (Cause god knows the price will be the same) ;)
    GrandTrain
    • This document looks reasonable, albeit old... because MS has likely known their harddisk plan for many months... so if it was a recent doc... it would have finalized the HD info.

      The cool thing though is that it says:

      ("built in" not decided)

      Which hopefully supports the rumors that there will be a HD for sure, but it might make an appearance as an optional plugin HD/MP3 player. I'm keeping my fingers crossed on that one.
      • Everything I've read and seen says that Microsoft is ditching the hard drive so the unit can't be used as the Xbox has by the hacker community. When did this change?
        • As far as I know, they've said it won't be inside the console for space reasons, but I don't think they've said there wouldn't be one at all. Hopefully we'll know for sure by June.

    • "- Note that intel will be running 65nm chips at 5+ Ghz in the same timeframe (2005)."

      But certainly at a price that'll be more than anyone will be willing to pay just for a game console? And that's just the central processing unit.

  • Interesting. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SphericalCrusher ( 739397 )
    Wow. From what I've seen, that's a very powerful console. It looks as if the Xbox 2 is shaping up to be just another power-house console, as its predecessor was. Hopefully they can release a good set of games to go with the excellent hardware though.

    Maybe we'll be seeing computers and consoles competing once again? Very doubtful, but just remember back when idSoftware wrote Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement? That was a work of art, and a large leap in the computer-gaming industry. Since then, comp

    • Re:Interesting. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by obeythefist ( 719316 )
      I fully expect the XBox 2 will be on-par with midrange PC games of the same time.

      I remember when the XBox itself was announced, sporting the new DX8 compliant predecessor to the GF3. Way in advance of the GF2 boards that were in the top of the range PC's.

      By the time the XBox hit the shelves, however, the top of the line PC's were all using GF3 Ti500's which were significantly faster than the XBox's embedded solution.

      In parallel, the XBox 2, in it's unannounced form, is shaping up to be faster than the c
      • The Cell will make or break Sony. And in order to break Sony, it just has to be that little bit slower or more awkward than the XBox's processing solution.

        Where do you get that? The PS2's processor architecture Is slower and more awkward than the XBox's solution--and last time I checked, they were miles ahead anyway.
        • How long has the PS2 been out before the GameCube and the Xbox? A year and a half? Thought so.
        • The XBox market share is growing. In fact, the level of growth is remarkable. To get to the #2 console position with only one (1) console generation is phenomenal performance. Microsoft have done this two ways. Firstly, they made a console with superior capability. Nobody who bought an XBox got a bad deal. In fact they got a great deal because of reason two: Microsoft blew a fat wad of cash to get where they are in the console market. Sony makes money on the PS2, Microsoft loses money on XBox.

          Now l
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • He's calling....from INSIDE THE HOUSE! (Score:5, Funny)

    by superultra ( 670002 ) on Tuesday April 27, 2004 @01:22AM (#8980589) Homepage
    This stuff is so outlandish I'm inclined to believe there's a javascript random rumor generator floating around the web that kicks in for the month preceding E3. It almost always begins with some kind of information from a Japanese developer or, in this case, a "Chinese BBS." It's the classic beginning to an urban legend. It's Asian, so it holds an air of reputability. At the same time, fewer people can just start researching this like we collectively did with the "Infinium Urban Legend." They have a picture, and in a community that orgasms a Doom III screenshot every three months, visuals are everything. Plus, people can comment on it and sound like they know what the hell they're talking about, as if they themselves worked on the machine.

    Just to get this out the way so we don't take up anymore of Slashdot's not-so-precious bandwidth: Microsoft will announce that the Xbox2 will be released this year, will have a clock speed of 16ghz, and will be supported by ATI, IBM, and McDonald's. It will both have a hard drive, and not have a hard drive. Not only that, but they will be releasing Halo 1.5 within weeks following E3, and Halo 2 will be pushed back to the Xbox 2. Also, Microsoft will buying at least three major developers, not the least of which are Bioware, Valve, Blizzard, and Sega. And Nintendo. And maybe Sony. And probably Microsoft, if they're feeling particularly moody. These are all true, because a Thai website (Http://www.thaixxxmassage.com) posted it a few days ago after Bill Gates stopped by. Actually, it was Bill Gates' gardner. Or at least his friend. Relative of. The friend. Who lives in Thailand.
    • I am going to bookmark your comment, and either praise you in 12months, and call you a total utter moron.

      So, be aware :)

      muwahahahaah
    • ...and will be supported by ATI, IBM, and McDonald's. It will both have a hard drive, and not have a hard drive.

      Oh, then they must be using the new Heisenberg UncertaintyTM hard-drives as an anti-hacking measure.

      If you open the case to mod, the Heisenberg drive will assume either a *present* or *absent* state.


      Mod at your own risk!!

  • Easy Now People (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't get why everyone thinks this diagram is so outlandish... are your expectations that low?

    It's a 3 core CPU... big deal... 65 nanometer tech is almost exactly 1/3 the size of the current Xbox cpu's tech... and they decided the real estate is best spent by having 3 cores.

    Secondly, why are you up in arms over 3.5GHz? The fastest intel cpus will be much faster than that at launch time... just like how they were faster than current 733MHz Xbox cpu when it launched.

    ~256MB of main RAM is expected, and ~
  • If the PS3 is released a year after XBox2, it should be more powerful than the XBox2. Xbox groupies can no longer say "Xbox has better graphics" when you point out that all the games are on PlayStation. :-)
  • hardware is really what makes a console system successful right? I didn't think so =)

  • The system has since slipped from that schedule - which also called for an unveiling of the specification at GDC, at the high-profile press conference which the company eventually used for the launch of the XNA development platform -

    For anybody who went to this years GDC and saw the XMA demo, maybe now you can sleep at night knowing what *that* was all about. ;)

    Nobody I talked to could figure out *what* Microsoft was try to say. It looked poorly rehersed and slapped together at the last moment (like my c

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