It seems that as with the iPhone 5 rumors the drama surrounding a possible successor to the Xbox 360 is really starting to take on a life of its own, with a number of sources coming out of the woodwork to ping us about what the new machine potentially could be.
When you gather up everything that we have been told, it seems that a lot of momentum is behind a potential announcement that Microsoft is said to be preparing to make at CES in January. According to the rumors, Microsoft will announce the technology that will power the next Xbox, and the company is expected to make this huge announcement during CES. It isn’t yet clear if they will be showing the actual prototype of the machine, but we suspect that this will be the case.
The latest unconfirmed talk has the new console using a hex-core CPU clocked in the 3GHz range, with two GB of DDR3 RAM. The graphics will be powered by an AMD GPU that will offer both more performance and features than the current Xbox 360 GPU.
While a number of stories have suggested that at least some studios might be working on development for the new console, no one is confirming these reports; and those studios that have been indicated in the reports have denied that they are developing for new Microsoft hardware.
We do believe that there is enough evidence to indicate that Microsoft is working toward a new console. What might happen at CES might have more to do with a potential announcement of the future direction of the Xbox platform and what some of the platform’s abilities will be going forward, rather than a lot of specifics and examples that are playable today. It could be that Microsoft will have a second more specific playable unveiling at E3 later in the year.
Rumors are just that; but we have found that when a number of people are talking about the same subject that all of the pieces are there, we just have to put them together correctly. If not, we can wait till January 10th thru the 13th at CES to see what Microsoft might be announcing, or not announcing if that is the case.
