There has been many rumours flying around the internet since January 26 about what the next Xbox has inside its rusty innards.

 With that said looking throug the numourous rumours for Nextbox, A couple stand out as much more real than the rest, namely the report that Microsoft began production of its Oban CPU at te beginning of the year which is primarily made by IBM. With the GPU being a custom Southern Islands HD 7000 series GPU from ATI. These initial IBM made CPUs were destined for dev kits initially which actually makes sense to the March timeframe of developers getting these kits. Demerjian further commented that User end Nextbox wont go into production till the end of this year.

http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/60921-rumor-xbox-720-chip-in-production

After this fairly believable and trustworthy source came out with this, many rumours have abounded round. But lets look at just what the GPU in the 720 will be capable  of based on the highly likely 7000 series.

Many reports now have come in that its a custom AMD Radeon HD 7850. So we can take a good look at what that might mean for 720.

Its core clock is 860mhz. With a Memory Clock of 2400Mhz running on 4800 DDR. Its Memory Bandwidth sits at 153.6 GB/sec and packs a mighty 1761.28 Gflops. Pixel Fill Rate of 27520 MPixels/sec, and a Texture Fill rate of  55040 Texels/sec. On top of that its fully DX11 compliant.

Compare this with what is currently in the 360 and its quite the glorious leap. 360 GPU Pixel Fill Rate 6600 MPixels/sec. Texture Fill rate 26400 Texels/sec. 200 flops and a memory bandwidth of 38.4 gb/sec. Only DX9.0c compliant.

For comparison the wii U is confirmed to be using a Power 7 3 core 4 thread per core CPU from Intels Watson family. Running 1.5gb ram and a custom GPU running from the RV770 chipset from ATI. Based on the AMD HD 4770 with a Mem Bandwidth of 51.2 GB/sec ( 1600 mhz clock on 3200DDR ) and hitting 960 GFLOPS. It has a Pixel Fill Rate of 12000 M/Pixels sec and a Texture Fillrate of of 24000 MTexels/sec. With its core clock at 750 mhz. DX10 compliant. No DX11 support.

A GPU like this in the neextbox would certainly be an amazing visual experience. In fact there is even talk of the nextbox being 2 of these migty GPUs. But if thats the case I cant see the CPU being anymore than 6 cores at most.

All figures based from

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=612&card2=678

*looks at thread title*
*reads first paragraph*

Ignoring the oddity of Wii U having it's own paragraph in an unrelated thread... why is Direct X mentioned in regards to Wii U? Isn't Direct X a Microsoft product?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX

yes. But its more in reference to the cards they are  based on.

Ok, you mean the card the Wii U architecture is based on and whether that card supports DirectX (insert number) when put into a PC or something... Kind of ignores that the Wii U version will be modified from the norm, so you can't know for sure if it could support DirectX 11, even though it won't however powerful it is, and you can't know for sure even if it was unmodified whether the features DirectX 11 touts can be done with the API the Wii U will use.

At least you moved the Wii paragraph to later on anyhow.

This GPU thing better be true even if a single GPU. WiiU developers will polish their games during the time Xbox 8 releases. Microsoft would want to make their early games look way better than WiiU or people will not be interested as much.

Eurogamer said it's NV+Intel

i don't trust any rumors - but look forward for the happy man buying the dev-station on ebay :) and hope he disassembles the kit and can even prove its real.
nextbox will definitely blow wiiu away which is not much a challenge, in my opinion. but that does not mean wiiu is not more powerful than x360 - it is.
we'll see who wins the sales-competition: nextbox or wiiu. my guess is still wiiu while nextbox still appeals more to, well, "men".