[citation][nom]gamerk316[/nom]Not shocked at the 2GB RAM; doesn't make sense for consoles to have any more. I do find dual-GPU's interesting though, and wonder how much poor scaling will affect the long-term viability of the console...[/citation]
I'll chalk it up to a neophyte rumor, IMO. Plenty of newbies who think that "if a dual-core CPU is good, a dual-core GPU should be great!" Further muddling it is the fact that PowerVR makes a multi-core GPU; but performance-wise said GPU (the SGXMP 543) is inferior. (it's multi-core simply for ease of design and adaptation between hundreds of different phone designs)
My bets are that, given that we can be assured at least, say, 50 million units eventually produced, (with at least 20 million on the initial fabrication process) there's no need to worry about scalability here, and the engineers will focus on a single, monolithic GPU that will last best. Of course, it still won't match the best ones out today, which does mean it'll be woefully obsolete a few years after release.
[citation][nom]billybobser[/nom]The Xbox720 is so bad, that when you see it, you turn around twice and walk away.[/citation]
You'd have to MOONwalk to get away from an Xbox if you turned 360 (or 720) degrees.
[citation][nom]pliskin1[/nom]Still too early, an announcement maybe but I doubt anything will hit shelves for 2-3 years.[/citation]
Well, historically consoles have shown up on shelves about 2-3 years (yes, that exact range) from when the first credible, widely-circulated information gets spread. Since we're just starting to see the first information about the 720... Bets are that it'll come out in time for Holidays 2013, but likely not much sooner than that.
[citation][nom]molo9000[/nom]Has any gaming console in history ever used an x86 processor?[/citation]
Um, yes. Ever heard of the original "Xbox?" (Camikazi pointed this out as well)
[citation][nom]Chef_Boyardee[/nom]...were basically getting outgunned for a fraction of the cost.[/citation]
Tip: you should've tried, y'know, raising the settings.
[citation][nom]supertrek32[/nom]The RAM strikes me as a bit low, though you can never really be sure with the massive amounts of console optimization.[/citation]
Also read as "simply stripping out most of the texture resolution and other content."
[citation][nom]blubbey[/nom]Could the GPU be something like a 4870x2? That's possibly what... 2-3x the power of the 360's graphics. RAM, not a surprise here. Probably 1600MHz since it's so cheap (on the scale they're getting it probably $10 per stick assuming they're using a single 2gb stick)[/citation]
Try closer to 10x the power of the 360's graphics. The Xbox 360 most closely matches, of AMD's PC lineup, the 3650 or 2600XT; those roughly match it for memory bandwidth, texture and pixel throughput, which usually bottlenecks their vastly higher shader throughput. And yes, if you ACTUALLY tweak the settings to match the things they "silently" disabled/turn down on the 360, they do yield comparable visual results. And the 4870x2 is approximately 10 times as potent as the 3650 across the board.
As for RAM, remember that they're not buying DIMMs, so it's both cheaper, as well as the fact that they're not limited to what RAM speeds are available for them. Case-in-point: look to video cards, where DDR3 has replaced more-expensive (and hotter-running) GDDR3 for lower-end cards. Typically, it's clocked up to 1800 MHz, though it could quite conceivably be found at 2 GHz or even above.
[citation][nom]Silmarunya[/nom]Is it me or does the theory posted above about the 720 having some sort of Bulldozer CPU sound a little odd? The PS3, Nintendo Wii and Wii U and especially the Xbox 360 all use some sort of RISC CPU. Moving back to x86 seems an odd move, especially considering RISC made huge leaps forward in recent years (thanks to the succes of IBM PowerPC, Fujitisi SPARC and especially ARM).Don't forget consoles are strongly TDP-bound: they need to run cool and quiet and that's impossible with Bulldozer. And for a low-ish yet high performance CPU, just about any RISC architecture is better than x86.Then there's the 2GB of RAM: that's very little. If the aim is to keep costs down, there are better targets than something as cheap as RAM. Dual GPU: possible. It would certainly keep costs down compared to a single high performance part and it might lead to more evenly divided heat output, making cooling easier. On the other hand, it would dramatically increase power consumption (and overall waste heat) and practically difficult in a space constrained device like a console.In other words, I doubt this post is to be taken seriously.[/citation]
I'm judging that the comments regarding "AMD CPU" are from people mis-reading "AMD GPU." After all, AMD owned ATi, and they didn't when the Xbox 360 was first designed. RISC CPUs have been there all along, as well; before PowerPC, there was the original MIPS, which featured in the Playstation, Nintendo64, PS2, and as late as the PSP.
As for the GPU, the opposite would happen with costs: the extra hassle of having another package on the motherboard is a piece of cost that won't go away. (at least until both dies were integrated into one package) Cost savings would MOSTLY at first come from economy of scale, by simply ordering twice as many. But since the console will remain constant throughout its life, that doesn't make much sense: even if the 720 is a flop Microsoft can still expect that they'll have used at least, say, 50 million GPUs, which is a staggering figure for a single part.
Lastly, 2GB of RAM is actually a reasonable expectation; the last generation has, during development, the PS3 and 360 deciding between 256MB and 512MB. fast-forward approximately 6 years to now, which means 3 Moore's Law generations, or x8 the density, which gives us 2048MB and 4096MB. Granted, given that this thing will more likely come out in 2013 than 2012, (Consoles don't come out and blindside you; you usually got 2 years' notice) so 2GB is definitely scraping the low-end. Of course, they may decide that with the resolution capped to 1920x1080, they might not have to invest so heavily into memory for textures.