Was looking at Kepler's leaks on Xbox's hardware plans, he is an AMD leaker that is pretty reliable. He believes that the reason why Xbox is going ahead with their next-gen console and OEM partner PC-consoles is because Xbox already signed a chipset contract with a minimum order requirement with AMD, that at this point it is cheaper for them to go ahead and release their next-gen hardware than it would be to pay AMD to back out of the contract or to buy the chipsets from AMD and give them to their OEM partners who will be making their own Xbox branded PC's. He said that the Xbox handheld was cancelled early in the R&D phase because AMD wanted a 10m order commitment in the contract, which Xbox was obviously unwilling to go for since no open platform handheld so far has managed to sell 10m units (SteamDeck is the highest with around 5m sales so far in 3 and a half years on the market), which is why Xbox is only going with OEM partners like Asus for Xbox branded handhelds now. But unlike the handheld chipset contract, the console chipset contract was already signed. He said that the next gen Xbox console chipset (codenamed Magnus) is most of the way through development at AMD right now, and is scheduled for tape-out (the final phase of development before mass production) later in Q4 this year.
As for the Magnus SOC that Kepler claims is powering the next-gen Xbox, it's design leaked back in June from 2 different AMD leakers, Kepler himself and MILD (Moore's Law is Dead). The Magnus SOC combines a Zen 6 CPU with an RDNA 5 GPU (Series X is Zen 2 and RDNA 2 by comparison, while PS5 Pro is Zen 2 and RDNA 3). It has three big Zen 6 CPU cores and six smaller but denser Zen 6c CPU cores. The graphics die seems to have 70 CU's, a sizeable increase over the 52 CU Xbox Series X. Leaks differ on memory speed, with leaks ranging from GDDR7 on a 184 bit bus all the way up to GDDR7 on a 384 bit bus, which results in a huge range from 644 GB/s of throughput all the way up to 1500 GB/s.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 06 October 2025
