I wonder if a Natal Xbox 360 isn't also tweaked hardware as well. If they can make the console 2.5-3* more powerful than the present box with roughly the same cost present per unit cost after a shrink to 45nm they could start a transition to more powerful hardware without losing revenue on the legacy boxes.
They could go for 1024MBit GDDR5 modules at 80GB/s bandwidth, tripple the ALU/Tex count and increasing the core clock of the gpu by 100Mhz to 650mhz and make it DX11+ compliant and increase the ED-Ram size to 14/16MB and integrate it with the GPU for lower latency and finally upgrade the CPU to 4 cores with 4MB L2 cache and PowerXCell 4-8 SPEs (the SPE DMA architecture may not interfere with legacy 360 code) whilst devoting a few of the SPEs directly to running the Natal camera (the camera uses a Spurs engine IIRC which is SPE based) and finally an HD-DVD drive so they can release games discs with 3 layers (two DVD 1 HD-DVD 15GB) and transition slowly to the new console.
Like 2010 Xbox 360 Natal + Xbox 3 release.
2014 end Xbox 360 support
Tease.
