User:Trap The Drum Wonder/Xbox 720

'''This essay is now defunct. Please see Xbox One. '''

The Xbox 720 is an upcoming video game console made by Microsoft, and successor to the Xbox 360. It will be released in the US around December 2013 with the public unveiling taking place at E3 2013 in June. The Xbox 720 competes with Sony's PlayStation 4 and Nintendo's Wii U as part of the eighth generation of video game consoles.

The production team from the Xbox 360 is working on the next Xbox 720, and they're looking into what kind of CPUs will be available on the market in 2012 or further. That would put the Xbox 360 at a lifespan of 6 or 7 years, a far cry from the Xbox’s 4 years. After spending $1.26 billion in losses launching the Xbox 360, they’ll want to get the most out of the system by lengthening its lifespan. As the longer you get into the cycle, the more profit you can make due to stopping being a loss leader, analysts always remark.

The console is rumoured to have a x64 architecture and 8 CPU cores running at 1.6 gigahertz. Each CPU thread has its own 32 KB L1 instruction cache and 32 KB L1 data cache. Each module of four CPU cores has a 2 MB L2 cache resulting in a total of 4 MB of L2 cache. Each core has one fully independent hardware thread with no shared execution resources. And each hardware thread can issue two instructions per clock.

The first commercial video of the console was leaked on YouTube on May 1, 2012.

Games
In an interview with the head of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business division, Peter Moore, EGM magazine asked him when their next video game console would come out, and also asked if they’d drop support for the Xbox 360 like they did with the original Xbox. He said that they were going to support it “as long as it sold.” Possibly because they saw the Xbox sell well into 2007 despite not producing the console after October 2005. Recent sources have said that the Xbox 360 will continue being supported for up to three years.

He said the production team from the Xbox 360 is working on the next Xbox 720 [our pet name], and they're looking into what kind of CPUs will be available on the market in 2011-2012. That would put the Xbox 360 at a lifespan of 6 or 7 years, a far cry from the Xbox’s 4 years. After spending $1.26 billion in losses launching the Xbox 360, they’ll want to get the most out of the system by lengthening its lifespan. As the longer you get into the cycle, the more profit you can make due to stopping being a loss leader, analysts always remark.

On June 13th, 2008, Robbie Bach — the President of Entertainment & Devices Division at Microsoft — mentioned the next Xbox by saying:

Our view is we will be selling Xbox 360 for a long time. We are always working on new technologies. We have people working on those. People ask me how many people I have working on the next generation. On the one hand, it’s everybody. On the other, it’s nobody. People are continuously working on new technology. We started thinking about the next generation before we shipped the Xbox 360. It doesn’t start with a date. It starts way upstream with silicon development. From that comes a series of data points. You start making early technology choices. It’s an evolving thing. Stuff doesn’t become concrete until you get inside a window of when you have to ship, more than 18 months or so out.

Visuals
In June 2009 TeamXbox.com claimed: “The only thing I’m going to say about everything I heard regarding the next Xbox is that it won’t launch until a certain type of television becomes more widespread because in addition to built-in Natal tech, a key feature of the next Xbox would be full HD stereoscopic 3D visuals similar to 3D movie theatres.”

In October 2009 Fuzilla.com industry sources claimed: AMD / ATI has already won the GPU deal for Microsoft’s next generation Xbox console. They also created the current Xbox 360 Xeon GPU, suggesting compatibility with legacy games. The report also states that the new console won’t be released before 2012, since the current economic recession is preventing an originally planned 2010 release. It has been rumored to have DirectX 11, which would be the first time any console has used the API's.

Forward Compatibility
The next-gen console will have 'forward compatibility'. This means Xbox 360 releases will be enhanced with: improved draw distance; better speed; additional functionality with the new controller; and possibly new features, such as Xbox 720-only downloadable content. Though only certain titles are compatible.