I see a lot of complaining here.

First of all, assuming this is true, for a system that is gonna cost $300 and fixes RROD, the specs are simply perfect. I would buy one myself if this is true.

GPU:
If this is shader model 5.0, I can already guess which architecture it would be based on. The R800, and we all know how well the R700 of ATi was.. So if this is true, the GPU will be one powerful thing.. And all people saying "it's only 600MHz", if you think MHz defines the power of a GPU, you seriously should search for some background info about this stuff... It the depends on the ammount of stream processors in the GPU, and since ATi has a superior architecture, this is gonna be one hell of a GPU right here.. And oh, this GPU would probably be on 40nm as well, which means low production costs and almost no heat. On performance I think it would be on par with an HD4870 or even better. You know why that is possible? Because ATi can make those GPU VERY cheaply with a hell of a lot of performance, and if they want 1080p native, that is the way to go.

28nm actually, if the RV740 packs in 830M transistors in 130mm^2 space (Xenos is currently 230M on 65nm with 121mm^2) meaning the Xenos 2 at 100mm^2 could have ~1.2B transistors or 6* as many as the Xenos. The current specifications of the Xenos are 48 (Nvidia equiv) shaders, so they could easily fit 256 equivelent shader model 5 shaders which would be written as something like 1280 using the same counting method AMD uses for their current GPUs. Also with the modern tessellation unit it could easily throw around a significant number of polygons (remember Forza 3 = 10* the polygon count of Forza 2?) and the CPU could lean on the shaders to perform massively parellel calculations as it would be packing compute shaders as well. Furthermore expect it to be a Directx 11+ class GPU with features pulled forward from Directx 12 and beyond.

CPU:
If this is true, this CPU is gonna be VERY powerful.. People keep complaining the CPU of the X360 is not that strong, but that's simply not true. For games, general purpose computing is a big part of the calculations, while floating point is a small part, and the X360 CPU is based on general purpose, while the PS3 has only one general purpose core, and the other ones are floating point calculators, which means, if it wants to do general purpose, the calculations need to be emulated. And the 3 cores of the X360 can handle 6 threads in total, and if it's double, I guess they could do some wacky stuff with this...

See above, the CPU could lean on the GPU for the tasks that don't suit it so it doesn't need to be relatively as powerful compared to the GPU and in any case it may have a camera interface to run.

Memory:
GDDR 5 says it all. Again I see people complaining "it's only twice as much, it should be more". But guess what, a big amount of RAM is not everything. The most important is still a low latency, and a high bandwidth, and GDDR5 provides that. 1024 MB is more than enough, because the OS will take almost nothing from it, and you could say games would have access to almost a whole GB, and seeing what can be pulled out of both the X360 and the PS3 at this moment with only 512MB, twice as much will really deliver.

The radeon HD 4770 has 55GB/S bandwidth, so expect about 60-70 depending on which memory speed they pick. Furthermore the ED ram saves a significant quantity of bandwidth and memory, especially with AA. You don't want to write back a 1920/1080 framebuffer @ double size with 2xMSAA do you?

Hard Disk:
One thing.. SSD costs more, but is also faster than a traditional Hard Disk. On reading that is.. Writing is slower.. So installing games might take longer, but I doubt they will remove the option to plug your current HD in it if all this is true. I would actually think it would be better if this was internal hard drive space but oh well..

The only weakness really for an SSD is cost. No optical drive could saturate the write speed of anything but one of the slowest SSD's available today. The real benefit is threefold. 1st. All consoles would have storage for online updates. 2nd. It would augment the memory available because the transfer speeds can exceed 400MB/S with low latency. 3rd. People could resume playing a game almost instantly and put the console in suspend mode.

Media Drive:
DVD is fine. Blu-Ray is overrated. The space is a problem, but I guess it isn't mandatory to include Blu-Ray. The only ones that complain about it are usually PS3 owners. And I guess if you want to keep the price down, you need to keep the DVD, especially since Sony might make it very hard for Microsoft to get them a Blu-Ray license....

WiFi:
If this is included it's a big plus, especially for that price of the system.

Price:
If it really is that cheap, I swear I'll buy one. At least, when I'm sure it doesn't have hardware problems.. And people, really... Stop complaining about more ram, Blu-Ray, and I don't know what else. Unless you want a $500+ dollar console, be happy with those specs and stop b*tching.

And one more thing. Last year, it was said that the next Xbox would be "forwards compatible". No one knew exactly what that meant.. What I always thought is that the current Xbox lives on as long as it needs to, and the next Xbox will be able to play ALL games of the X360 without emulation, but with upgraded graphics. In other words, it's simply an X360 V2, where it's basically the same console, but more powerful on graphics, and supports all X360 games completely, and if they release a game for the new Xbox, it will work on the X360 as well, but with less eye candy. That's what I thought anyway.. So if this rumor is true, then I guess it does have to do with that forwards compatible thing..

Link to that forwards compatible thing:
http://xboxevolved.e-mpire.com/article/3rd_generation_Xbox/4902.html

These specs are completely reasonable, actually.

The claim about a 6-core Xenon having as many flops as the Cell is silly, but I think the architecture is respectable. The Xenon cores all share a L2 cache, and unless you make the cache downright titanic, the thrashing from 6 cores/12 threads doing any serious parallel tasks would never compare to the independant cache-miss-free architecture of the Cell SPU system.

For that matter, trying to keep 6 cores equally busy is also something of a problem, except during embarrassingly parallel operations, where thrashing becomes an issue with a shared cache resource, as I mentioned above.  The Cell is not actually a poor gaming architecture at all, despite the relative difficulty in using it well.  Having 8, 12, etc cores really won't do anything but hike the cost of the next XBox.

On the other hand, a 600 MHz GPU may be downright phenominal -- the number of pipelines isn't mentioned at all... it could be like 128 for all we know.

You could argue that the amount of memory that a console has is directly related to its resource-induced development expense, and that having more than 1GB of memory may actually be a waste of money for MS, as well as a resource that devs just plain won't want to use...


Take a step back, and realize what very little has been said here, before you jump up and call it a fake (even though it may very well be).

Shams, you are missing the point:

1-  Casuals aren't bored with the Wii, and  they're not of the "Ooh shiny" variety like gamers are. They could advertise Natal and this propsed "upgrade" until they're blue in the face, casuals who own Wii systems aren't going to bite. The likely response from this crowd will be "$200? For another game system? That's airfare to Florida right there. My Wii good enough, thanks."

2- Going on that, Nintendo isn't going to sit idly by, and instead be continuing to impress their customers with more interesting products. Every other person has dismissed that fact that Ubisoft is coming out with a motion camera for the Wii in 2009. This will further confuse the casual gamer to see what the big deal is over another gaming system a year later on.

Basically the only way this can be huge, as you say, is if the current 360 fans go out and buy the new version. Ps3 fans will continue to resist, being the loyal fanbase that they are. Ultimately, the news only delays my 360 purchase to a wait-and-see approach. If I was going to drop money on a 360 for $300, I'm sure as hell going to wait and see if there's any truth to this news, to get a more powerful 360 next year, if it happens.