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shikamaru317 on 11 February 2024
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aTokenYeti said:

New rumor out that the Surface team will be designing the next Xbox hardware. This raises a lot of interesting questions for me:

1. Will they stick with AMD, or consider a different hardware vendor? Microsoft has an extremely lucrative relationship with Intel, and now that intel has been making a hard push into the GPU and AI space that could be an intriguing option.

2. Will Xbox go back to being one device, or will it balloon into many devices?

3. If it’s many devices, will one of those devices be mobile/handheld? Or perhaps something hybrid like a switch?

The third one in particular is really intriguing to me. They could mitigate a lot of the negatives of going third party for a lot of their games by having the option of a hybrid console like a switch or steamdeck. Frankly, I would vastly prefer something like that to an expensive and bulky gaming laptop, and that would do a lot to keep me in the Xbox ecosystem

The recent leaks I've seen answer some of those questions:

1. Yes, they seem to be sticking with AMD, supposedly they will be using a Zen 5 CPU (up from Zen 2 on Series S/X) and an RDNA 5 GPU (up from RDNA 2 on Series S/X) with a release plan of 2026.

2. The most recent leak, which seems to have been corroborated by 2 different sources, is that they will indeed have 2 pieces of official hardware next.

3. The above leak says that the 2 pieces of official hardware are a high end console to replace the Series X, and a handheld/console hybrid with a Switch-like dock. No cheaper Series S replacement it's looking like right now, as I'm sure the hybrid handheld will be at least the same price as the high end console if they don't want it's specs to hold back developers even more than Series S did.

But then we also have the Indiana Jones leaker who claimed that 3rd party OEM vendors were being allowed to make Xbox branded PC consoles, so it seems like there may be alot of Xbox hardware options next gen. I just hope they decide to run them all on a stripped down Windows OS so that Steam can run on the next-gen Xbox hardware in addition to Microsoft Store and PC Gamepass games. Having Steam as an option on next-gen Xbox's would solve so many of the problems Xbox has with winning over 3rd party ports. 

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 11 February 2024