At this point, most of us are willing to put our money on Microsoft and Sony announcing their upcoming consoles at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), an annual game industry trade show held in Los Angeles.
With every potential console announcement comes rumors of hardware specs and features. We can’t confirm whether these are true, but most of what’s leaked or discussed is consistent and falls in line with what a next-generation machine would reasonably be capable of.
Here’s some of what VGLeaks says (from a Joystiq report) says about Microsoft’s next Xbox system, reportedly codenamed “Durango” and dubbed Xbox 720 by gamers and the press:
CPU:
- x64 Architecture
- 8 CPU cores running at 1.6GHz
- Each CPU thread has its own 32 KB L1 instruction cache and 32 KB L1 data cache
- Each module of four CPU cores has a 2MB L2 cache resulting in a total of 4MB of L2 cache
- Each core has one fully independent hardware thread with no shared execution resources
- Each hardware thread can issue two instructions per clock
GPU:
- Custom D3D11.1 class 800 MHz graphics processor
- 12 shader cores providing a total of 768 threads
Of course, these are just numbers, and it’s difficult to say just how it will look when it’s rendering a game on a screen. If there’s anything to take out of this, it’s that the next Xbox will be a powerful machine. However, if this is accurate, it may not be as powerful as the PlayStation 4, based on what we heard last week.
They also mention a “High-fidelity Natural User Interface (NUI) sensor” that “is always present.” According to Joystiq’s report, this implies some sort of Kinect-like functionality is built into the console. A hard drive and a Blu-ray disc drive are also in this rumored device.
E3 is still five months away, and a lot can happen in the weeks leading up to the conference.