According to the latest issue of Xbox World magazine, devkits for Microsoft’s next generation console are already in the wild, and were shipped to developers in March. The first devkits reached a select number of developers after Microsoft’s hush-hush developer’s conference in London on February 28, 2012. The purpose of the conference was to brief European representatives on the new hardware, which is codenamed Durango – the meeting was subsequently confirmed by a senior technical artist at Crytek, who tweeted that he was “enjoying the Durango developers summit in London. So far, great swag and interesting talks.” Further meetings were held for American developers at the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco, with Durango devkits shipping “shortly afterwards.”

The publication states that current devkits will not mirror the final hardware in appearance, however, initial specifications are representative of the console set to ship in late 2013. Sources close to Xbox World magazine have revealed that Durango’s devkit features a “monster” 16-core IBM PowerPC CPU, a GPU comparable to AMD’s Radeon HD 7000-series graphics cards, and a Blu-Ray optical drive. 

“Even if you had a 16-core processor in your gaming PC there are currently no games built to use it, but games for the next Xbox could put all sixteen cores to work on day one for a level of performance far in excess of current gaming PCs. It’s a ridiculous amount of power for a games machine – too much power, even. But remember, Kinect 2 could chew up four whole cores tracking multiple players right down to their fingertips, so it’ll need a lot of power.”

Discrete sources at GDC also confirmed to the publication that developers expect Sony’s Playstation 4 to be more powerful than the next Xbox, and that various studios are aiming to unveil their next generation software at E3 2012 in June, regardless of whether “Microsoft and Sony are ready or not.”

“Regardless of whether the next Xbox makes it to E3, the arrival of those Durango devkits is the starting gun for the next generation and once again Microsoft have beaten Sony out of the gate by getting hardware into the developers’ hands first. Sony keep denying any possibility of PS4 at E3 2012 too, but if they don’t move fast Microsoft could roll into June’s LA showcase with dozens of next-generation exclusives from third-parties. When Epic shows that first Unreal 4 demo they’ll only have one console platform to talk about – call it Durango, call it 720, call it what you like, but if Microsoft move fast it might be the only game in town.”

 

http://sillegamer.com/2012/04/06/xbox-720-devkit-specs-detailed-includes-16-core-processor/

Geez 16 core processor?!? How much is this thing going to cost?!

I'm not sure if I believe that rumor though because 16 core processors are all over $500 (all the one's I could find at least). I'm sure MS could get them for much cheaper than that but even if they manage 50-60% off of those prices we're still looking at over $200 for the processor alone.

these rumors are just getting out of control. Dual GPU, 16 cores, WiiU really powerful, Wii U not powerful at all, PS4 > Xbox 3, Xbox 3 > PS4... Ridiculous.

Sounds extremely expensive

Hold on, I thought it was said PS4 dev kits were given at the beginning of 2012? Yet they said here xbox beat Sony out of the gate...

Lol at 16 cores..
Most likely it is a (stripped down?) 4core Power7 processor (4 threads per core = 16 threads, not cores).

Depends, Microsoft will be the one in control of the manufacturing.

PowerPC is generally a small and efficient microarchietcture, if say the CPU cores were similar to that of the XBox 360 ...
It ended up costing 165 million transisters for 3 cores or 55 million transisters per core, Multiply 55 by 16 and you get 880 million transisters which is actually smaller than the Intel Core i7 and AMD processors in transister budget, so manufacturing costs wise it won't be that expensive if they go with a 40nm or smaller node.
For example the Phenom 2 x6's sold for about $150 here in Australia at one point, built at 45nm with 904 million transisters for a die-size of 346mm2.
And that's with AMD's profit included in that price, if Microsoft releases it at 32nm or 28nm it could be cheap as chips to manufacture even if it's 1 billion transisters.

However, you have to take into account that PowerPC doesn't have to waste transister budget on legacy backwards compatability and being RISC and not CISC based is naturally more efficient.
Plus PowerPC cores in the likes of the PS3 and XBox 360 were in-order, which is very similar to the likes of the Intel Atom of today, this saves a fairly large amount of transister budget at a cost of performance, don't expect Per Core performance to be higher than x86, but do expect allot more of them. :)
Hopefully this means that console ports to PC's will start utilising my 8 core processor more extensively.

The bright side is that, because emulating the CPU between different architectures is difficult... More so than the GPU, hopefully this means that the next Xbox will be compatible with the Xbox 360's games library as they are using the same PowerPC architecture.

E3 is still a couple of months away. The rumors will only get worse. 

16 cores?

The power brick for the XBox 720 is going to be the size of the Wii U console, lol.

I could sorta see this if they're doing some crazy next-gen Kinect stuff and require a CPU to do a ton of motion sensing/capture stuff/voice recognition, that could chew up a lot of the CPU "cores". And then if you have a lite version of Windows 8 running on it too ...

Òverkill allways sells more hardware....