Video Gamer is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices subject to change. Learn more
730,762,774,1348,1521,1612,2700Microsoft must be pulling their (collective) hair out as there has been yet another leak of information on their next console. Play Magazine appears to be the source of the information, which has obviously arrived with some subscribers a little ahead of time. While we don’t have the magazine in our possession and therefore can’t say for certain if this information is real, various sources are claiming this is the real deal.
There will, apparently, be 2 types of Xbox Live: Gold and Silver, with Silver allowing for play at the weekends at no charge. It would seem that most of the services that the Gold service offers will be available to Silver members, bar some enhanced matchmaking services. For existing Xbox Live subscribers, moving to the next console should be pretty easy, as existing Xbox Live accounts will be transferable to the Xbox 360. The full list of features for the next version of Live is as follows:
- Seamless transition to Xbox Live account from Xbox to Xbox 360
- Access to MMOs (additional fees may apply)
- Free Xbox Live weekends
- Multiplayer online gameplay
- Avatar for gamer profile
- Motto for gamer profile
- Personalized look for Xbox System Guide
- Offline achievements
- Online achievements
- Access to other players’ Gamer cards via Live
- Cumulative gamer score
- Location/language profile
- Reputation
- Enhanced matchmaking using above
- Skill level matchmaking
- Gameplay style profile (casual, competitive, etc.)
- Recent players list
- Free and premium download game content
- Free and premium downloadable movies, music, TV
- Downloadable demos/trailers
- Micro transactions
- Custom playlist in every game
- Play music from portable devices
- View images from digital camera
- Stream media from Windows XP
- Interactive screen savers
- Track info for CDs
- Communication with voice, video or text
The hardware itself is pretty similar to the leaked information from the GDC earlier in the year. Wireless controllers, customisable face plates and a detachable 20 GB hard disk are all said to be part of the new console and it will be fully WiFi ready.
Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
- 3 symmetrical cores at 3.2 GHz each
- 2 hardware threads per core
- 1 VMX-128 vector unit per core
- 1 MB L2 cache
CPU Game Math Performance
- 9 billion dots per second
Custom ATI Graphics Processor
- 500 MHz
- 10 MB embedded DRAM
- 48-way parallel floating-point shader pipelines
- unified shader architecture
Memory
- 512 MB GDDR3 RAM
- 700 MHz DDR
Memory Bandwidth
- 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
- 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
- 21.6 GB/s front side bus
Audio
- Multi-channel surround sound output
- Supports 48khz 16-Bit audio
- 320 independent decompression channels
- 32 Bit processing
- 256+ audio channels
We’ll have to wait until the MTV show this Thursday, or maybe even Microsoft’s pre-E3 conference next week before we can know for sure if all this is true, but it appears that it is. All that remains to be seen is what the Xbox 360 games will look like. We’ll hopefully bring you first hand experience with those games next week.
