Maybe MS should just design and engineer a poorly disguised PC as the Xbox 3.0 to make it easier for all those overworked and perplexed software engineers.

High yield (low cost) Nehalem i7 quadcore based CPU, high yield Nvidia R200 based single core GPU, and a full GB of shared DDR3 memory and MANDATORY mass storage media.

But then, what would be the point of marketing such a box other than as a budget gaming PC that costs less than what a system builder could make themself using off the shelf parts? Hm... MS still gets to sell hardware and licensed peripherals and collect licensing fees for apps published on their platform and maintain their own fee based network gaming service. Oh right; that.

Not much point in speculating what the next gen of hardware will be using since A) the basis for the the components most likely does not currently exist, and B) there is no definitive answer as to when consumers will actually be seeing it.

I believe that both Nintendo, Sony and MS believe it's in their best interests from a financial standpoint to keep their current gen hardware for as long as consumers are still buying games en masse for them.

What will probably happen is that the first company whose platform starts to experience seriously flagging soft and hardware sales (drop over previous year) will end up jumping the gun on the next generation.

Personally, I think he just like to complain. It's not a knock on Valve or the games they make (which I love), but seriously Gabe, just do your flippin' job and be done with it. He sounds like a professional race car driver who always blames the car he's driving for the difficulty he's having cutting faster lap times on a track.

Newell would probably still be complaining about the implementation of a quadcore CPU despite the overwhelming odds that's where the entire industry's headed anyway.

they are doing that already, well the only difference it's PPC based.

but of course PPC are PC processors used at MACs even if apple fanboys scream and cry they PCs too.

RISC PPCs were the hardware basis for the Mac architecture from the late early 90s to the early 2000s.
PPC 601, 602, 603, 604, G3, G4, G5. (Apple, IBM and Motorola joint ventured the development)

The PPC CPU architecture was more Mac than it ever was PC. Even today, you can't build a PC around a PPC CPU using off the shelf parts.

It was only when the PPC architecture ran into a developmental brick wall (heat/size to performance) that Apple adopted the simpler solution and just based their computers around Intel Core/2 chips instead.

The Mac's never been better as a result. I should know since I've been buying them since the Mac 68k days dating back to the late 80s.

Don't hate on the Mac: they just plain work. Anything other than a good prebuilt OEM PC is a high maintenance machine if you want the best performance out of it. Even the prebuilts have far more problems than Macs just going off basic consumer feedback data.

As a PC builder, I can vouch for that too.

Actually what are you suggesting for next Xbox isn't a bad idea. Since algorithms & all are done mainly for PC it would help a lot in development. If you make whole new system, you need to redevelop most of algorithms you have done/there is. If its completely different, it will take even more time and will cost even more.

And I also agree with Newell. Hes the first person who will whine about annoying fly in room, but as I said hes not wrong about it. :)

@Deneidez&Greenmedic: Maybe the suggested wasn't a bad idea, but it's expensive solution anyway. Usually the reduced instruction set CPU:s tend to be cheaper than the "high commands" CPU:s. Although, these days RISC and CISC aren't that far away from each other what they used to be.

What Gabe Newell is complaining may be true, but at the time the games were supposed to entertain, instead of pushing hardware to its limits, it really didn't matter that much.

*update*

PC awesome, thanks to physX with GPUs. :)

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/55999