Gamespy Reveals Xbox Next Specs

Gamespy's reporters have been on the ground at the GDC, and managed to wrangle specifications for Microsoft's upcoming next-gen console. From the article: "Xenon's CPU has three 3.0 GHz PowerPC cores. Each core is capable of two instructions per cycle and has an L1 cache with 32 KB for data and 32 KB for instructions. The three cores share 1 MB of L2 cache. Alpha 2 developer kits currently have two cores instead of three."

Comments

Yeah, but MS still holds all the cards.

[grub]

Thief: Deadly Shadows had a pretty bad flaw resuming a game saved at whatever difficulty reverted the game back to normal difficulty. I wrote Eidos Customer Support about an xbox live or physical update to T:DS and received this:

Thank you for your message. An updated version of Thief 3 was made for the Xbox, however Microsoft never gave us approval to release a new version. The game cannot be patched through Xbox Live, as the game was never set up to support Xbox Live. I apologize for the inconvenience.

"Microsoft never gave us approval to release a new version". How's that for a kick in the pants? So for this new xbox I'm going to sit tight until a modchip is released and do nothing but "try before I buy".

A camera?!

[Golgafrinchan]

Camera - Xenon will have a USB 2.0 camera. It's capable of 1.2 megapixel still shots and VGA video. Photos can be used in-game and for gamer profiles. The camera can also be used for video chat. It's unknown if the Xenon camera will allow for EyeToy-like gameplay. Developers are currently using a simulated camera driver.

Maybe I'm behind the times, but this is the first I've heard of a camera as a part of the Xbox2. If they make the hard drive optional, it seems they should make the camera optional.

I can't believe that more people would want a camera in their Xbox2 than a hard drive.

Great. Now I'm going to have to watch idiots taunt me over Live rather than just hear them.