Is it a bit early to talk about the next Xbox? Possibly, since the Xbox 360 just received a massive refresh with the addition of Kinect. There are still 3 years of life left in this console, but it appears that rumors about the next-generation device, which we call for simplicity reason Xbox 720, suggest that it will be integrating the second-generation AMD Fusion processor.

There is no credible source for this rumor other than a scenario that has been laid out by Tweaktown. “It looks like the next-gen XBox will be based on technology from AMD based on production at Globalfoundaries on their 28nm ‘high-k gate first’ process.” That may be true or not, but for both AMD and Globalfoundries, this would be a major deal, given the production volumes of game consoles these days. However, this idea would go somewhat against AMD’s current direct to focus its products on the traditional PC market.

TweakTown’s reasoning largely stems from Microsoft being unhappy with Intel and Nvidia, which may have also been the reasoning why the Xbox 360 uses the IBM Xenon CPU in the Xbox 360 and an R600 graphics chip from ATI (AMD). Could the next Xbox use an AMD chip? Absolutely. Will it be an AMD chip? We believe that this is too early to call as Microsoft won’t rely just on relationships alone. The Xbox is big business and Microsoft will need the best product. If it gets it from AMD, it will be an AMD chip. If it will be Intel, it will be Intel.

We can say, however, that the next Xbox hardware will be vastly more powerful than what we have with the 360. The Xbox 360 is rated at a raw floating point performance of about 1 TFlops, while the PS3 has a theoretical peak of 2.36 TFlops. Given the progress we have seen over the past few years, it should not be too surprising if the next generation of game consoles will not only integrate APUs instead of CPUs, but provide 3 to 5x more processing capability as well.

[[Xbox 360]]

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