Xbox Successor Specs Leaked?

24 Jun, 2004 at 11:57am ET Article published in Tech

Specs rumoured for the XBOX’S successor, codenamed Xenon, have allegedly been leaked to the Xbox-fanatic website xbox-scene.com.

An anonymous e-mailer supplied the supposed hardware specifications for the Xenon CPU as being powered by a 3.5 GHz IBM PowerPC processor, and a 500+Mhz ATI graphics processor. Apparently, “Xenon” runs an operating system based on Windows NT, very similar to the Xbox operating system. A superset of Microsoft’s Direct3D 9.0 runs the graphics interface, apparently. The CPU is said to include three processors – or cores –, all independent, on a single die. Each core runs at 3.5Ghz, enabling the Xenon CPU to issue two instructions per clock cycle for each core – at it’s best, Xenon can handle 21 billion instructions per second.

Source: The Inquirer

Comments

24 Jun 2004 ~ 12:21pm Thrax Oh good, now their borg cube is capable of flight with all the cooling it's going to need.
24 Jun 2004 ~ 3:01pm Templar I doubt that's correct :squint: Sure, three cores is possible, but on a home gaming system? There's no way they're going to sell this at $299 and make a profit, and I'm sure as hell not buying anything over $299 to play just video games on. Especially with no HDD...
24 Jun 2004 ~ 3:04pm Geeky1 Wonder if it can be made to fold somehow...
24 Jun 2004 ~ 5:18pm Gobbles your talking between the processor and graphics alone... 600 dollars.. tag onto that ram and anything else... I find this to absolute BS...

Gobbles
24 Jun 2004 ~ 5:27pm panzerkw

Templar wrote:

I doubt that's correct :squint: Sure, three cores is possible, but on a home gaming system? There's no way they're going to sell this at $299 and make a profit, and I'm sure as hell not buying anything over $299 to play just video games on. Especially with no HDD...

Microsoft doesn't care if it loses money on selling the system. The games is where the money will be made. MS only cares about market share. The more market share, the more developers that will want to make games for the system. More developers = more games = more $$$
24 Jun 2004 ~ 5:51pm Medlock Microsoft already loses money on the costs of the current xbox... I forget where I heard that, but it's like panzer explained.
24 Jun 2004 ~ 6:04pm Sputnik everyon wonders why games for consoles cost so much, all about licencing the editing tools and publishing rights.

windows on a PPC again? that's good to hear. last time they did that was back in the NT4 days (if i remember correctly).
24 Jun 2004 ~ 7:21pm Camman

panzerkw wrote:

Microsoft doesn't care if it loses money on selling the system. The games is where the money will be made. MS only cares about market share. The more market share, the more developers that will want to make games for the system. More developers = more games = more $$$

Actually I think I remember reading that Microsoft didn't care about losing money on the first Xbox system because they knew that was what it was going to take to break into the market, but, I'm pretty sure they wanted to have some sort of profit by the second generation machine.
24 Jun 2004 ~ 8:17pm Garg

Camman wrote:

Actually I think I remember reading that Microsoft didn't care about losing money on the first Xbox system because they knew that was what it was going to take to break into the market, but, I'm pretty sure they wanted to have some sort of profit by the second generation machine.

I'd have to agree. Loosing money on anything isn't optimal. And the amount of money they'd lose on this box seems enormous compared to what they lost on the first one.

The specs seem a little too impressive anyway.
24 Jun 2004 ~ 8:30pm TheBaron that thing would be much higher end than most modern pc's. no f'ing way
24 Jun 2004 ~ 9:05pm KingFish If I remember correct Microsoft obtained hardware from Nvidia that was ahead of its time when the original Xbox was launched. I'm just curious to see how true this rumour turns out to be.

KF
24 Jun 2004 ~ 9:35pm qparadox BS, PPC architecture favours very wide (parallel) and short pipelines. Getting up to 3.5 Ghz on a console machine on a PPC architecture would be INSANE performance. Unless IBM has pulled a miracle out of its SOI technology this is waaay too high a clock frequency. I could see more likely that its two cores running @ 1.75 Ghz (or 3@ 1.15G).
24 Jun 2004 ~ 11:30pm Jengo man there is no way,

that xbox will be better then most of our PC's... unless your running an A64........

come on..

i doubt those specs are true