To be honest, the leaked Xbox specs showed a lot of ESRAM and other fancy move engines or whatnot. The specs included some custom tech to make the data access "faster" than the DDR3's data rate limit. It may be a tad different to program for, but if the end results are very similar data transfer speeds with considerably less cost, MS may go that route and have a $100 cheaper console than Sony with once again very similar level of graphics/performance.
To me, that is a very smart move and will open up a lot more profitability for them as long as 8GB of DDR3 is enough to handle everything they want the box to do. But, if their custom hardware requires a lot of different and complex programming, they may get the PS3's Cell treatment and take much longer to get optimized games or suffer the poor port fate. It is anybody's guess here until we know the confirmed specs from Microsoft.
The amount of profit MS makes on the 360 at this point, with no price cuts for the last 4-5 years, must be astounding since it was already making $75 profit way back in 2007 before the slim down. So I would not be surprised if they go the "almost as good" route in order to make profit returns faster on their hardware.
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