@Slimebeast: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208445

32 GB SSD for $100 at retail. Next year they'll cost what, $20-$40 to make?

No Blu-Ray format for game discs? I tell you this MS would be fools to leave out Blu-Ray in their next system. DVD is a dying format and game developers will not be happy.
DVD holds only 6.8Gb of data per disc. Blu-Ray holds 50Gb per disc.

Actually its funny I just put together something like this as a test spec for the system. It would have 3x the memory bandwidth, no tiling for 1080P with 4aAA FP16 available for developers to use, compute shader for developers if they want more floating point performance for animation etc a large SSD cache which can be doubled as storage as well and the CPU in question would walk rings around the current Cell processor and they could do it all with a combined die with roughly 200mm^2 area with 1.6B transistors on the 32nm process.

You guys are missing the point.

If this is *backwards* compatible - and if it contains the same CPU, same architecture - just souped up - its basically an enhanced 360.

MS are overdue on a 360-slim - we also know that the 360 still suffers from bad architecture in general.

If MS can make this happen, and at a near-Wii pricepoint - it would be huge. It would also be the perfect way to launch NATAL. NATAL on its own might take 1-2 cores and a heap of RAM - so give half the machine to NATAL, and the other half to run games.

They really do seem hell-bent on hurting Sony - this would go a long way towards doing so.

NATAL only-software would run on NATAL-only hardware anyway - so why not bundle the controller with an updated console?

It also means they could slash the price of existing 360 models - making a lot of gamers very happy.

...

Not saying its true, just saying that it sounds possible to me. It would be aimed at the Wii-market, and launch with a Rare developed Wii-Sports rip-off (or similar).

Only thing that seems 'odd' is the choice of a SSD rather than hard disk... wonder why? SSD makes much more sense for a portable device than a console.

8.5GB per disc, not 6.8.

Now that would be like GC to Wii. Guess not bad.

Hmm, the biggest surprise to me is that it doesn't use HD-DVD as the disk drive. I am farily confident that this source is a fake based on this alone.

Also
exactly twice the ram? Processors are identical but with twice as many cores. It's two 360's ducttaped together :P

these will sound pretty weak in 2015, after 6 years, because if i'm not mistaken MS said they are going on with Xbox360 until 2015 and that's why the put Natal on Xbox360 instead of making a brand new console

@shams: Some MS guy said in an interview that the Natal processing is all done on the peripheral.

@ Shams whats inefficient about the current Xbox 360 architecture aside from not having enough ED-ram?