Dean Takahashi has written an article up at the Mercury News right now that purports to be "quietly circulated" specifications for the next version of Microsoft's gaming console, the Xbox. They can be boiled down to several points:
- Three PowerPC processors
- ATI graphics processor
- No hard drive
- DVD or Blu-Ray drive
- 256 Mb of RAM
- Possibly no backwards compatibility
I was considering a wry comment or two in this space about those specifications, but the commentary sooned drowned out the... information, if it can be called that, so I'll be posting that separately in Narc's Retorts.UPDATE: The Junkyard has pointed out a tidbit I didn't know about this article, namely that the writer, Dean Takahashi, is also the author of Opening the Xbox. While the subtitle of this volume, Inside Microsoft's Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution seems to indicate more than a small amount of partiality to the console, one would still think that Takahashi would be "in the know" about possible future Xbox specs, lending a bit more credibility to the story than it might otherwise have. Unfortunately, I still think that's bad news for the Xbox and its fans. Jake 'Evergreen98' Billo at The Junkyard also doesn't seem to think these are good ideas.
Comments
Sphtman
Hrmmmm...
By the sounds of the hardware the production cost is going to be huge. There is a possiblity that M$ won't make a profit from the console itself, but from its games.
Now the idea of no harddrive seems a little backwards. I mean sure it makes sense to cut production costs, but the harddrive did come in useful. A smaller flash drive would make perfect sense. However the MP3 playing during gaming was semi-useful.
The backwards compatibility is a big deal. Not having it would cripple Xbox2's game library compared to the PS3. Besides they already purchased the technology behind Connectix's VMware which would allow them to achieve backwards compatibility. Because of the standardized hardware they could take advantage of its full potiential.
narcogen
Console Trends
In reply to: Hrmmmm...Most console makers don't profit from the console much, if ever. MS certainly didn't on the Xbox's launch price, and even as manufacturing costs may have been shaved, the retail price has also come down. There's little reason to think that MS will be able to compete with Sony and Nintendo AND buck this trend as well.
I own an iPod so I've never really bothered with using the Xbox to play music, although I do use it as a DVD player quite often. For me, the problem with losing the hard drive is the inability to download content, upgrade or patch games, or to enjoy the quick load times of games like Halo that use the HD extensively.
Backwards compatibility is a huge deal, but I doubt that the purchase of Connectix has much bearing on this issue. Emulation always causes performance degradation. In particular, floating point operations while translating between little- and big-endian architectures cause huge performance hits, much more than integer operations; and that would be the situation if the PPC-based Xbox 2 tries to emulate the x86-based Xbox 1.