Xbox 2.5 in 2009?
- Scribbled on May 13th, 2008 by Jonah Falcon
- Filed in Hardware Mods, Industry News, Microsoft Xbox 360, Rumor Mill
TG Daily is speculating that the smaller 65nm “Valhalla” chips will lead to the creation of a “360 slim”, similar to the PlayStation 2 slim design.
A more dramatic and perhaps visible change will happen next year: TSMC plans to begin producing the Valhalla chip, which will be the foundation of the mid-cycle refresh of the Xbox 360, thus called ‘Xbox 2.5’ or simply ‘Xbox 540’ (360+180), in fall of 2009. We learned that this new chip is apparently much more than a die-shrink and end up as a system-on-a-chip design. This change is likely to enable to redesign the Xbox 360 casing and go towards a slim-design, much like what Sony did with the Gen1 and Gen2 PS2. We believe that TSMC will use a 45 nm process for this Multi-Chip-Module package (CPU+GPU+eDRAM).
There are also some interesting pieces of information that Microsoft is shopping for a more efficient cooling solution – efficient in more ways than just one: Several people close to the cooling industry told us that Microsoft approached them and asked for better and cheaper cooling than what is used in the Xbox 360 right now. Some may claim that the current Xbox 360 cooler design is already as cheap as it gets, but we have no doubts that Microsoft will find a way to drop the cost once again.
Does a slimmed version of the Xbox 360 intrigue you? Let us know.
(Thanks, X3F.)
May 13th, 2008 at 10:40 am
a slim version, nothing like finally overcoming the heat problem then reducing the airflow again…
May 13th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Great. More new hardware from Microsoft. I wish they would concentrate more on making their current customers happy by not sending back defective refurbs as part of their “repair” process.
May 13th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
i think if they can really find a good solution to the overheating problem and keep the raw power of x360 intact or improve on it it’ll be a good thing
May 14th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
[...] is reporting that Microsoft is denying claims that they are developing an Xbox 360 slim. “While we don’t normally comment on rumors like this, we can tell you that we have no [...]