UPDATED 13:06 EST / JANUARY 23 2013

NEWS

What Will the Next Xbox Have? Leaked Specs Hit the Market

Xbox fans may already be rejoicing as proof of the upcoming Xbox, codenamed Durango, had been revealed by VGleaks.

In what it claims as a world exclusive, the site has revealed full specifications of Durango.

CPU

  • x64 Architecture
  • 8 CPU cores running at 1.6 gigahertz (GHz)
  • 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 2 MB L2 cache resulting in a total of 4 MB 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
  • each thread can perform one scalar multiplication and addition operation (MADD) per clock cycle
  • at peak performance, the GPU can effectively issue 1.2 trillion floating-point operations per second

High-fidelity Natural User Interface (NUI) sensor is always present

Storage and Memory

  • 8 gigabyte (GB) of RAM DDR3 (68 GB/s)
  • 32 MB of fast embedded SRAM (ESRAM) (102 GB/s)
  • from the GPU’s perspective the bandwidths of system memory and ESRAM are parallel providing combined peak bandwidth of 170 GB/sec.
  • Hard drive is always present
  • 50 GB 6x Blu-ray Disc drive

Networking

  • Gigabit Ethernet
  • Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct

Hardware Accelerators

  • Move engines
  • Image, video, and audio codecs
  • Kinect multichannel echo cancellation (MEC) hardware
  • Cryptography engines for encryption and decryption, and hashing

VGleaks also released photos of Durango’s Alpha Kit, the system which developers would use in making games or whatever for the upcoming Xbox, which looks like a typical computer box or CPU of a desktop PC.  It has ports for Kinect, the controller, Ethernet, HDMI, and a bunch of other ports.  It doesn’t look like a game console, it doesn’t even resemble the Xbox 360 but that’s just Microsoft being careful, the company doesn’t want to reveal what the next Xbox would look like until it ready and not to have the design stolen.

As for what’s inside the Durango Alpha Kit, it has 8 cores (x64 CPU), 12 GB RAM (8 + 4), 12 GB of RAM, rather than the 8 GB in the final design as the extra 4 GB of RAM facilitates development of console system software, DirectX 11.x GPU, a discrete graphics card similar in capability and speed to the GPU that will be used in the final design but it does not have the ESRAM that the final design GPU will include, 50GB Blu-ray Disk drive, HDD, etc.


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