RUMOR MILL: Xbox 720 Chip Developed
- Scribbled on August 20th, 2011 by Jonah Falcon
- Filed in Microsoft Xbox 360, Rumor Mill
It seems that the merger of ATI and AMD will be a strong part of the next Xbox hardware, as rumors out of Redmond, WA is that the next Microsoft console’s chip is named and specced.
The new chip is allegedly called “Obed”, and according to rumor site Semi Accurate:
“Obed it seems is SoC, CPU + GPU, and of course eDRAM, it sounds an awful lot like an evolutionary version of the current XBox 360 chip. Some say it is an x86/Bulldozer part, but everything we have been hearing for a long time says that the chip is going to be a PPC variant. In any case, the GPU is definitely made by AMD/ATI, and IBM has a big hand in the SoC design.”
The most interesting part of the news is that production is set for late 2012, possibly the early days of 2013. This would put the Xbox 720 release as holiday 2013.
August 20th, 2011 at 10:51 pm
That’s just for the chip production though, holiday 2013 is probably still too ambitious for everything else that’s required for a console. They ned to produce dev units, get those into the hands of developers in significant quantity and have game development time too. Even if the chips are produced in January and they don’t have the yield problems that the PS3 did 10 months isn’t enough dev time to have a decent launch lineup. A triple-A title takes anywhere from 12 to 18 months dev time.
I could see chip production, motherboards and dev systems in the hands of developers by Q1 2013, decent tech demos at E3 a quarter later and some awesome playable stuff by Christmas ’13, but the system won’t be ready for prime time with games until 2014 (with Halo 4 as a launch/pack in.)
August 24th, 2011 at 8:27 pm
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August 25th, 2011 at 12:12 am
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