LNC EX: Xbox2 Specs Revealed?
Yep, it's a Sunday night LNC update, as this one couldn't wait...Team Xbox sends along word of this Mercury News article that supposedly reveals the specs on Microsoft's next-generation Xbox system. So what's the beef? Apparently it will feature three 64-bit processors from IBM (said to be the same as those featured in Apple's G5 towers), an ATI processor that's more powerful than the upcoming R400, either 256 or 512 MB of DDR RAM, either DVD or Blu-Ray DVD format discs, and as rumored...no hard drive. Instead the current plan really is apparently to ditch it in favor of flash memory in an attempt to keep the price down. Considering that the hard drive is vital to enable downloadable content (not to mention caching for games) developers aren't too thrilled at this idea. Epic's Tim Sweeney is quoted as saying, "For a console to really have a useful online component, it has to have the hard drive to store downloaded maps and other data." Also of note is word that backwards compatibility is not guaranteed at this point, and that Microsoft is using Apple G5 computers to build game prototypes. Who says Mac gaming is dead?
Team Xbox has their own story on this, which contains some additional details, including word that the graphics chip is based on the R500 core. Here's an excerpt of that:
What nobody is telling you and you'll know about this first, here on TeamXbox, is the revolutionary approach of the Xbox 2 to deal with today's biggest problem in graphics chips: memory bandwidth. The graphic chip will contain not only a graphics rendering core but up embedded DRAM acting as a frame buffer that is big enough to handle an image that is 480i and can be 4 times over sampled and double buffered. Yeah, we all remember Bitboys but this time you can bet this is for real. This solution will finally make possible HDTV visuals with full screen Anti-Aliasing on. The technology also supports up to 512 MB of external memory on a 256-bit bus. However, current specs plan to use 256 MB RAM, big enough for next-generation visuals which are all about computational power rather than large storage.
