Kim: 360 until 2015!

[heruamon]

Squilliam said:

With downloads of full games they could support a higher end SKU easily and give people an incentive to download vs owning the full retail package.

Lets see:

Xbox 360 Hardware:

Xenos/Xenon combined on a single die with a clock speed bump of ~10-20% for each so the Xenos GPU would be running at ~600-650Mhz and the Xenon would be running at ~3.4-3.6Ghz. They could also add a few more ALUs to the GPU, bump the ED ram size and add another core as well.

For the ram switch to a 64bit interface with GDDR5 with say ~40% more system bandwidth and use 4 2Gbit chips to give a total of 1GB of ram.

If they switch to something like that they could achieve something like a 40% overall performance improvement cheaply and with other tweaks they could extend the life of the Xbox 360 by at least two years. Furthermore they could easily add several Xbox 360+ applications which wouldn't be possible on the Xbox 360, especially with the new Natal interface opening up some possibilities.

This is essentially like the PSP or DSi improvements, so please don't complain unless you've voiced complaints over the handheld hardware tweaks first. It would make for fewer accusations of being a hypocrite.

The only thing about that  is I don't believe would seek to alienate current xbox 360 users, so they would have to ensure that developers make the games scalible to different console models.  I think we will see the same think with M$ using SD cards as well, since that gets around the DVD limitations of space, and also the transfer speeds associated with running games off brd.