Xbox 2 specification conjecture

News - What's under the hood?

There's nothing like a healthy dose of spurious conjecture to kick-off the week in a fun and tabloid fashion, and suitably this report provides just such titillation as VE3D.com this morning reports on a Mercury news piece and subsequent TeamXbox follow-up.

Here's a few tidbits then, from the TeamXbox story, supposedly providing a leak of Xbox 2 specification details from a Microsoft insider:

The Xbox 2 will use three 64-bit processors. But we'll give you even more details. They'll be PowerPC processors, based on the PowerPC 976, the first dual-core 97x chip based on IBM's 64-bit POWER5 architecture, which will also be the first PowerPC built on a 65nm manufacturing process. The graphic chip will be based on the the R500. This VPU has been in design at ATI's Marlborough, Mass. office. It'll be fully compatible with DirectX 9's PS and VS 3.0 and the next version of DirectX: DX10, the same suite of APIs that will be used in Longhorn.
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.

The report also suggests that the next-generation of Xbox technology (whether named Xbox 2 or Xbox Next), will not be backwards compatible with current Xbox titles, owing to the expense of licensing technology from out-of-favour NVIDIA. Also, we're reliably informed that no hard drive will be present in this iteration of the hardware, with some form of Flash memory being the order of the day instead. I urge you to read the full news stories for all the juicy gossip.