2 years (3 and a half by late 2013) is a long time in the tech world and a lot of things can change (like the chip foundries delaying new proccess which has happened a few times in the last couple years) and new technologies being introduced. There is also the fact that devs like Epic and Crytek have both made it clear they are pushing for more powerful consoles, and the Samaritan demo was only shown last year and UE4 has only recently been finalised which will both have an impact on the kind of hardware that MS will go for. The final hardware probably still hasn't been finalised today tho it is probably a lot closer to what they will end up using. I doubt the first dev kits for internal devs were even finalised in 2010.

I don't really have any intention of following and posting every Next Box rumour, so if you want a centralised rumour thread you will have to do that yourself. I only posted this one because it seemed like a major leak with a lot of interesting info on what (if it was an actual leak) that MS was thinking in terms of where Xbox is going in the future. If there are similar major leaks (or detailed tech specs I guess) I will post them in a new thread (if not posted by someone else) it's not like they pop up every week or anything. If you don't like em they are pretty easy to ignore.

I saw this posted over on Gaf

Hey guys.

Tom Warren here (Senior Editor at The Verge). I posted this story at The Verge yesterday. I just wanted to clear up a few things and address some points I've seen posted elsewhere etc. The Xbox 720 leak was covered by The Verge at The Verge, not Polygon at The Verge. I know the temporary home can be confusing at times, but thought it was important to point that out.

As for how we check these types of stories. I have been reporting on Microsoft for around 12 years now. That's not to say I know everything about Microsoft and its processes, but I have a fairly good idea of what is and isn't an internal doc usually after the first few pages. This document in question is from August 2010, prior to iOS 4.2 (mentioned in the PPT notes) and when certain team members (mentioned in doc notes) were still at the company in engineering roles. The document references several employees by name and uses one of Microsoft's internal "CSG_Pres" PowerPoint templates (an early example of their Metro style PowerPoint templates that are used regularly internally now). 

Couple this with the fact it aligns with other information I've seen about Nextbox over the past year, it aligned perfectly. The document also references Microsoft's SmartGlass technology (announced at E3). I went through a number of other ways to verify the information was as accurate as other stories we would report on - I'm not going to outline the exact processes because I like to keep those secret :)

We make every attempt to ensure this type of data is accurate. I ran a number of stories ahead of this year's E3, and they were all accurate:

Microsoft to bring full Internet Explorer browsing to Xbox 360 with Kinect controls
Exclusive: Kinect Play Fit to offer universal exercise tracking with 'Joule' heart rate monitor
Exclusive: $99 Xbox 360 + Kinect bundle launching next week with two-year subscription
Exclusive: Microsoft to preview 'Woodstock' Xbox music service at E3

Hopefully this clears up any questions over how we vet this type of information.

This one for sure. It was the earlier one and is not as biased as the other one.

Durango and Kinect 2.0 for 299$? First day buy for me.

I don't understand one thing. Would it have 3 separate CPUs and 2 GPUs?
(I app CPU, one BC CPU and one CPU for "always on")

They are gonna selling at a pretty hefty loss with the specs slimebeast posted. I guess it's a good business decision though, because they can afford it, while Sony can't

Very good specs if true.

And all that plus Kinect 2.0 for $299?...impressive.

All that for $299 would be great but it's too good to be true :p

No the "Always on" part corresponds to some cores/ALUs of the SOC always working while the rest is in sleep mode.

I like the 50W $50 SoC part, though. Completely delusional but makes for a good read. The "Back compatible" part is probably also delusional, no way that thing would burn less than 150-180W if everything is present.

Remember when the PS3 was only supposed to be $399 with all that tech packed in? I'm getting the same feeling from this.