Beef Jack
Next-gen Xbox Live powered by around 300,000 servers, USB 3.0 and Blu-ray confirmed, “Xbox one architecture” to utilise three separate operating systems.
Addressing an assembled audience of peers and press at Microsoft’s official next-gen Xbox unveiling, Xbox’s Marc Whitten took us “under the hood” and showed off some of the internal workings of the newly-unveiled Xbox One.
Hitting viewers with the classic press conference rope-a-dope, Whitten began to lull viewers to sleep with words like “future-proof” before smacking all in attendance in the face with numbers like five-billion while spouting off an ungodly amount of info about the new console’s innards. “There are three ambitious investments that we made to drive a new generation of entertainment,” he said, before detailing the new “Xbox One architecture”. The new system will be comprised of three operating systems, each with a specific purpose – one for gaming, one for web based applications, and the last geared towards “instant switching and multitasking,” essentially allowing the former two to run smoothly together.
Whitten described the witches-brew of solder and invention as “rocket-science level stuff,” in what might well have been a brief detour from the autocue. In describing Xbox One as a “modern, powerful box, engineered to deliver now and well into the future,” Whitten confirmed the long-rumoured inclusion of Blu-ray compatibility, as well as USB 3.0, native 64-bit architecture, five-billion transistors and eight gigabytes of RAM – although no mention was made of the possibility of different versions of the console that might harbour lower specs. The eight gig of RAM represents a sixteen-fold increase on the current-gen Xbox 360 and brings the console well in line with current-gen PC hardware. Apparently, all this fancy hardware will be bundled as part of a console boasting “practically silent operation”.
Keeping up the rope-a-dope them nicely, Whitten talked about Kinect for a bit before pulling the evenings most random statistic out of the air – Xbox One has more Xbox Live server support than the “entire world’s computing power in 1999” – zing! Take that 1999. That’s 300,000 servers – compared with around fifteen-thousand on the Xbox 360, which is definitely a lot more. Rocket-science level stuff indeed.
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