Those of you that missed the MTV special last night for the next generation Xbox unveiling should seriously thank all that’s holy. What an aborted mess. Aside from showing the console for about 3 seconds during the entire show, the rest of it was the most heinous of flashy, stylistic tripe. Elijah, you poor dear soul, do you really need money that badly?
However, today we see more relevant details emerge and those details are, to my mind, smokin’. From an explicit promise that no game will depart the building lacking high-def 720p support to the realization that it will be the most powerful piece of hardware in my home for some time to come — with its triple 3.2GHz core PPC processor and highly-pipelined ATI graphics processor — to the dreamy form-factor seen above, everything about this thing speaks directly to my inner geek. Hopefully they’ll have the games to match though with the amount of time I personally spent on Project Gotham Racing 2 the inclusion of PGR3 at launch will likely be enough for me.
See you on the other side.
dram Says:May 14th, 2005 at 11:29 am
The author of the link you posted above was surprised about the Xbox 360 liquid cooling system. I have to agree. It’s a bold move– one that I hope the PC industry will continue to migrate towards. It will just be interesting to see if Microsoft can ship a few hundred thousand units that hold up over time with liquid innards.
I disgree with the author’s statement about the PPU issue. With 3 PPC cores and various GPU-accelerated collision and rigid body physics approaches emerging out there, the Xbox 360 won’t have a problem in this area. (On that note, I don’t expect for AGEIA to have much of an advantage in the PPU market for long. I’m sure that NVIDIA will respond with some integrated PPU solution and purchase a partner like Havok if dedicated physics acceleration HW proves profitable.)
Microsoft definitely needs to include DVD progressive upscan to 720p or 1080i in this unit. I’ll buy one for every TV in the house if the price is reasonable. (That’s going to be interesting with the guts in this new one. I wonder what the suggested retail price is going to be for a “premium” version?)
I’m sure that you’re pleased with the PowerPC choice, CF. I have to admit that I would be happy to see Motorola stage a market-share “comeback” after all of these years. I’m still upset that 8086/286/386 set the world back by a decade when Intel beat my beloved 680×0-series into oblivion solely due to Motorola’s inability to deliver enough CPUs to IBM years ago
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Can’t wait for PGR3, either… go get Forza, dammit!
Cron's Rants and Raves Says:May 15th, 2005 at 1:27 am
Xbox 360 Released
Well, as I am sure most of you know, I am not a very gaming consol focused blog. As a matter of fact this will be the first post I have done on anything of the sort. However there has been so much hype all over the internet about Microsoft’s newly r…
adminmatt Says:May 15th, 2005 at 7:07 pm
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AdamStac Says:May 15th, 2005 at 8:24 pm
Ooh….Ahh….
This is awesome!
dram Says:May 22nd, 2005 at 10:03 am
I made a mistake assuming that Microsoft would use Motorola supplied PowerPC chips. Looks like IBM has the lock on producing them for Xbox 360. Motorola screwed up yet again on not winning that contract.
Of course, NVIDIA learned the hard way that Microsoft is a tough negotiator when it comes to Xbox chip supply. We’ll see if the relationship with IBM and ATI is more profitable for everyone this time around.
I’m happy to see Microsoft support something other than the dominant Intel x86 architecture (with all of the myriad extensions from AMD and Intel).