I'm going with November 2012. They can announce it at e3 next year making a huge competition with Nintendos WiiU.

I'd rather have that than, "Guess what - you get something in 18 months." MS seemed to get big kudos when the announced the Xbox slim because it was released near immediately. Heck, they'd do better to have the next system be out within a month of announcing it instead of June to November.

With how much advanced time they need to give third party developers, we will hear rumblings of specs long before a new console is released.

Yeah, there's a big difference between announcing a redesign of the same console and a brand new console. The software doesn't just magically appear.

Well when you look at the age of the 360, if this were a pc it would be classified as "ancient". Yet it still has life in it. But it's creeping up on being around 6 years old which in this technoloical age is old. PC gamers know the full extent of this when playing swap out with video cards every six months.

To show the wide difference you only need to look at the specs of the ATI Xenos chip in the 360 and compare it to the newer offering from ATI/AMD.

That has always been true of consoles and PCs. The advantage of a console is unified specifications. Developers tend to squeeze more out of a console than a PC. Also, on a PC you can use screen resolutions above 1080p. How much better are graphics going to look on a new console compared to what we are getting now? We may get a new console in 2012 not made by Nintendo, but I doubt it. Xbox is selling really well and Microsoft is finally making money on the hardware in addition to the licensing fees. I don't think they or Sony are really that eager to manufacture a new box.

For pinata and/or anyone using a flash drive to store their game saves. How do you backup your data?

I was just copying the whole Xbox360 folder to my hard drive. But I'm not sure if I can just copy that to another flash drive and work the same. After formatting that flash drive of course.

And yeah, I will check Google too, but I trust more in you guys.

I haven't done it in ages, but I was just putting them on my NAS. Flash->Flash may work. It's about to become a pointless exercise depending on how they implement cloud storage.

I hope they do the cloud storage like they do on Steam where it's seamless and in the background. As opposed to how they do it on PSN where it's 100% manual.

I really hope it becomes pointless after they introduce cloud storage.

Somebody posted an interview with John Carmack over in the E3 thread. He said a large issue with today's consoles compared to PC is the amount of memory they have. I forget the exact figure, maybe 512mb, but he said because of the memory limitations they have to drastically reduce the textures on the consoles.

I think the answer to your question then is considerably better. Sure you won't see the same sort of detail benefits you'd get above 1080p, but as Carmack also says that frees up resources for other things on consoles (e.g., 60 fps v 30 fps).

Well another big issue is the DVD drive versus the BD one in terms of all that information, both video and audio, cammed on the disc. This has as much importance as on board memory to ram to cpu to the graphics chip.The more intense and detail the more space is needed. I can remember back in the days of Unreal Tournament you needed a whopping 650mb of HD space. It's rumored for BF:3 somewhere around 15 GB's will be needed. It takes both space, HP and memory to run this stuff. The DVD drive is already being maxed out and MS won't think about a BD addon player which no-one has a clue why not.

Having a 360 add-on isn't going to give you 360 games on BD. It would only be for movie playing. They won't because it's of no value and they'd end up paying Sony a portion of the sales.

Now the next-gen MS console could (and should) incorporate some new high-capacity media solution. Doesn't mean it'll be BD though. May not even be optical.

It is funny that there has been so much talk about moving towards no physical media, but games are pushing towards 20 GB.

All good points. Personally, I am in no hurry. Of course, I thought the same thing before getting a 360 and HDTV and it didn't take me long to sell off my last gen systems and games once I started HD gaming.

One problem with, some, optical drives is reading times. It's faster to read from hard drive that from DVD and/or BD. I think BD is even slower in some cases.

So, I think they may mix it for next gen, a 1 TB hard drive, all games can run from HD as it's now, but no DVD disc needed all the time. They should be able to do that somehow.

I wonder if EA would ship BF3 on 2-3 discs and allow a large chunk to be installed on the hard drive if the PC version really is going to require a 15GB install space. Is that something that is limited by MS, or is that at the discretion of the developer? I know when I played ME2 it was on 2 discs and you had to switch between them a few times. However, I did not install that so I don't know how much space was required.

Good point. As game size increases, and ISP download limits decrease, I don't see physical media going away any time soon.

Edit: OLD INFO FROM LAST YEAR MISTAKENLY POSTED AS NEW

TrueAchievements: New Xbox 360 Chip on the Horizon

Possible price cuts in store

Written by Perpalicious today at 17:21

Microsoft announced today that its Xbox 360 250GB Kinect-ready, slim model will receive a SoC (System-on-chip) processor, according to information released by International Business Times.

With the new SoC processor, the 360 will combine its GPU, CPU, memory, and I/O (input/out) logic onto a single chip.

The move apparently comes to combat AMD's next-generation processors. This new chip is the first desktop processor to combine the four features onto a single unit, creating tough competition for both Intel and AMD.

As a result of the combination, the processor has better power efficiency, which has caused a beneficial domino effect. Power supply unit and motherboard both will be reduced drastically in size as well improved heat management. In addition, fewer chips will be manufactured meaning cheaper units.

A price drop has not been officially confirmed but with Microsoft's heavy promotion of Kinect at their E3 presentation, a reduction in price is more likely to entice people to buy a bundle.


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Hope this happens pretty soon as I'm in the market for a new machine and would rather get one with the new chip.

That's old according to MajorNelson, so no price cut and current Xboxes already have that SoC.

Son of a bitch!

plus the article appears to have been pulled.

You've been Grouchoed!

Apparently so, and now it's even followed me to my Twitter account:

You have terrible recommendations.