Kim: 360 until 2015!

[heruamon]

Squilliam said:

heruamon said:

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.

A hard transition between generations would alienate consumers more than a model update and a moving target of specifications. Especially if they use digital distribution which they are rolling out now. Wouldn't a smarter model for moving beyond the Xbox 360 be to use two smaller hardware jumps than one large jump and keep compatibility for as long as possible with the older SKUs? The best way to get around the limitations of DVD transfer rates would be a HDD install, if every game downloaded was designed with the 70MB/s transer speed (16* BR equivelent) then they could drastically increase performance.

@SSJ

I would say it'd go without saying that they would mandate the developers design their games with both specifications in mind.

Well...the history of consoles certianly support your points...Nintendo lost it's crown to Sony with PS and PS2, and Wii and 360 completely hammered PS3 cornation in a major way, due to the gyations of generational consoles.  I'd say M$ has to be very careful to not alieanate users with older hardware, if they trek upon this strategy.  What you're talking about would deliver full B/C, and that would be a huge plus, and it would certianly be ALOT easier for M$ to really reap some profits from the development of the 360...