Insane numbers for the 360! 1.7million in nov!!, 7yrs old and still selling crazy numbers

Insane numbers for the 360! 1.7million in nov!!, 7yrs old and still selling crazy numbers, i hope MS don't rethink there next-gen strategy and delay it.



http://twitter.com/#!/majornelson/status/145281603...

Now for the new stuff. The XBox Next/720 Oban chip is in initial production. Sources at a foundry with a blue logo, confirm that Oban wafers started running in the final days of 2011. Sources on the other side of the continent in Redmond when questioned, said, “Who the f*&$ told you that? I am going to f#*&ing rip someone’s head off”. We at SemiAccurate take this as confirmation that the initial sources were in the right ballpark.

Other sources at Microsoft, conveniently out of head-ripping-off range, said that the initial order was for around 10K wafers, mostly at the aforementioned three letter logo’d company, but a sizeable chunk is being run at Global Foundries too. Again, coincidence? We doubt it.

So, time for a little speculation. Oban is being made by IBM primarily, so that almost definitively puts to bed the idea of an x86 CPU that has been floating. We said we were 99+% sure that the XBox Next/720 is a Power PC CPU plus an ATI GCN/HD7000/Southern Islands GPU, and with this last data point, we are now confident that it is 99.9+%. Why? Several licensing agreements that cover what can be made where will enrich a fleet of lawyers if Oban is x86, but do not preclude the possibility entirely, hence the last .1%.
If you assume the chip is an SoC, and is made on 300mm 32nm SOI wafers, you can come up with a bunch of interesting numbers. Yield on these parts should be pretty high, it is for AMD’s Bulldozer, and those chips run at a much higher speeds on the same process as Oban. If the chip is huge, basically reticle sized at 550-600mm^2, you can expect to get about 100 die candidates per wafer.

With 10K wafers, 100 candidates per, and lowballing yields at 20%, you are looking way way more chips than initially necessary for dev kits. Before you jump up and down about the chances of an XBox 720 under the summer “School’s Out Tree”, these chips are NOT destined for production consoles. You will not get one unless you are in line for a dev kit, or know someone at Microsoft with a penchant for handing out top secret keychains.

Sources are still saying to expect silicon production for retail consoles to start late this year, and that guidance won’t change until the first round of volume parts is analyzed late in the quarter. Production for end user consoles isn’t going to start until late 2012, so don’t expect the XBox Next/720 before spring 2013. One thing you can say for sure now is that the console is real now, and the momentum is really picking up.

The next Xbox will ship to retailers in late October or early November of next year with six times the processing power of the Xbox 360, sources close to the project have told IGN.

Following initial reports from tech blogs Fudzilla and SemiAccurate, our sources have confirmed that mass production of the system's GPU will indeed begin by the end of 2012 but will not, however, be based on AMD's 7000 series Southern Islands GPU. Instead, the processor will be derived from the 6000 series, which was introduced last year. More specifically, it will be akin to the Radeon HD 6670, which offers support for DirectX11, multidisplay output, 3D and 1080p HD output. The chip currently has a market price of upwards of $79.99.

In real terms, the Xbox 720's raw graphics processing power is expected to be six times that of the Xbox 360 and will yield 20-percent greater performance than Nintendo's forthcoming console, the Wii U.

Developers are likely to receive development kits based on the system's final configuration in August. Projected pricing for the console was not provided.

Not as powerful as maybe some of us had hoped lol, if its true.

If it releases using tech that is several years old it will be dead on arrival.

First CoD on new xbox is going to run 1080p on updated engine. Same crap, high def and will sells bazylions. The wont change engine thats gold.

If it releases using tech that is several years old it will be dead on arrival. Early adopters, the people that invest and get you off the ground are a demanding bunch and paying anything for old tech is laughable.

I highly doubt these rumours tbh, doesn't sound very microsoft like, doesn't fit in with the scheme of things. If wii U is only marginally more powerful than a 360 and 720 is only marginally more powerful than wii U what is there to differentiate them, where is the reason to invest again if technically they are only marginally more powerful than what we have today. I see no reason to reverse course and abandon PC either, I like my consoles but them being stuck in 2005 has lost me, making the next generation stuck in 2010 isn't much of an incentive.

Well, that still doesn't address my main point: Microsoft is perfectly willing to sell the next Xbox on novelty. Look at how well they've managed to push Kinect with very little software. The success of Kinect pretty much validates their position on the casual marketplace, and to me, they've appeared to care much more about increasing those numbers than they have providing anything fancy for the so called "core." If any of these rumors are to be believed, Microsoft sees the next Xbox as an entertainment platform beyond gaming too. That's not to say that they won't provide typical experiences, I'm certain they will, but I do not think that's their top priority anymore.

We will see.

And I suspect that Kotaku will be walking back from their "no used games" rumor at some point, at least as the picture becomes clearer.

I guess it is a good thing there are 3 console makers in the market. If MS pulls a Wii-qual and Sony stays a relative course and MS shifts towards Kinect -- oh, and they pretty much gutted their 1st party MGS studios -- then the choice will be obvious.

Oddly it is the history of companies beating themselves that allows the competitors to win out. In this case Sony could win be default sticking with a more conservative version of their current agenda.

While I don't think a "no used games" solution is out of the realm of possibility, there are more than just pissed off penny pinching gamers to answer to if it becomes a reality.
Unless publishers go the digital distribution route exclusively, there would be millions of useless disks being thrown in the trash, contributing largely to the pollution of our environment.

There would be hell to pay to environmentalists - remember the AOL junk-mail disk shenanigans?

The industry would have to fund some type of massive legitimate "game recycling" program, which would quickly eat away at any potential profit gains from putting the squash on used software.