Is there any proof that a console cannot change its configuration?

[slowmo]

walsufnir said:

slowmo said:
This is no way confirmed but there is a quite well publicized rumour that the Sega Saturn had a 2nd CPU added late in the design process to try and improve the performance to match the Playstation 1. This might be why there was serious bottlenecks in the design with the shared bus of the CPU and also the various memory access limitations.

http://segaretro.org/Sega_Saturn_Development
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Saturn

As stated by earlier posters, its highly unlikely to happen but hardware can and has been changed late in the design process before. The example of switching to a Intel CPU by the way would be impossible without a complete redesign, any changes would have to be of very similar architecture.

And the Saturn failed ;) Yes, Sega added the second sh-2 late to compete with psx which was the only thing they could do back then.

But nowadays I think Sony and MS were well-informed what the competitor was doing and it was clear very early both would go for a similar approach as no one wanted custom cpus again.

There are now two possibilities:

1. All current spec-rumors regarding Durango are mostly wrong. The specs we got came from an old dev-kit which MS in the meantime changed massive.

2. the current spec-rumors are true. Then MS has only a little chance to change crucial parts of the design. But keep in mind that we don't have the whole picture of the specs yet.

I just wanted to answer the OP's original query of whether there was any proof a console could or couldn't change its configuration.  I don't hold much faith in specifications of a console based off a early dev kit which in all likelyhood was a performance target and not completely representative of the finalized hardware.  I doubt the 21st May announcement will clear the specs confusion up though, that will be over the coming months as devs spill the beans once the NDA's expire.