Microsoft Xbox 360

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The new curvaceous Xbox 360 certainly looks more modern than the current Xbox, although the leap in technical performance is far more dramatic. There is a three core IBM processor running at 3.2GHz in each core and the ability to generate 500 million polygons per second and a Floating Point Performance of 1 teraflop. Whether this will beat the new offerings by Sony and Nintendo in real life, we will just have to see, but it will be a notceable improvement on even the current Xbox, which is still very impressive. Initial game releases should include Perfect Dark Zero, Kameo: Elements of Power, Gears of War, Project Gotham Racing 3, Demonik, NBA 2K6, Need for Speed Most Wanted, Quake 4, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06, Tom Clancy's Ghost recon 3 and Top Spin 2. The Xbox 360 will play a full native resolution on High Definition televisions and will also use wireless remote joypads, which should avoid tangled cables and make the overall setup far tidier.

The console does however stick to DVD format for the discs, whereas the new Playstation will be using Blu-ray discs that can store several times more and it is not yet known whether the console is backwards compatible with the original Xbox.

The Xbox 360 will be able to act as a DVD player, although like with the original Xbox, you may need to purchase the DVD remote to get this function to work. The Xbox 360 should be available at the end of the year, comfortably ahead of the next Playstation and it should help to give them the boost in initial sales that they lacked with the original system by launching nearly a year after the original Playstation. The world of gaming is going to change considerably over the next year...

SPECIFICATION

Processor:
- Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
- Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
- Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads in total
- 1MB Level 2 Cache

CPU Game Math Performance:
- 9 billion dot product operations per second

Custom ATI Graphics Processor:
- 10MB of embedded DRAM
- 48-way parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
- unified shader architecture

Polygon Performance:
- 500 million trinagles per second

Memory:
- 512MB of 700 MHz GDDR3 RAM

Memory bandwidth:
- 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
- 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
- 21.6 GB/s front-side bus

Overall System Floating-Point Performance:
- 1 teraflop

Storage:
- Detachable and upgradeable 20GB hard drive
- 12x dual-layer DVD-ROM
- Memory unit support starting at 64MB

I/O:
- Support for up to four wireless controllers
- Three USB ports
- Two memory stick slots

Online:
- Out of the box Xbox Live service
- Built-in Ethernet port
- Wi-Fi ready: 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g
- Video camera ready

High-Definition Game Support:
- All games supported at 16:9, 720p and 1080i anti-aliasing
- Standard-definition and high-definition video output supported

Audio:
Multi-channel surround sound

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