Xbox 720 release date, specs, rumours

The Xbox 360 is in its eigth year now and, in the West at least, sits comfortable at the top of the console gaming pack.
A follow up console is innevitable - and the name most have settled on is the Xbox 720 - no matter how spuriously that came about.
Although some of the Xbox 720 rumours doing the rounds are a little more speculative than others, as the eagerly awaited next-generation console edges ever closer to reality, a flurry of reports suggest it will emerge later this year.

Xbox 720 Release Date

Right now, there’s no concrete information about the release of Microsoft’s next-generation console but Sony’s PS4 reveal event in New York has set the rumour mill churning.

Industry analysts won’t make any solid predictions but the received wisdom is that Microsoft isn’t about to sit on its hands and let Sony steal the march on the next-gen.

One of the reasons the Xbox 360 outsold the PS3 in the West is because it was out almost a full year before the PS3 hit the market. Microsoft understands that getting to market first can be the silver bullet in establishing dominance.

Now that the Sony PS4 is off the blocks – with a scheduled release date of Holiday 2013 (that’s December in the UK) – the pressure is on Microsoft to step up.

Still, the only information that’s emerged thus far comes in the form a countdown clock that was posted on the blog of the director of programming for Xbox Live, Larry Hryb AKA Major Nelson.

The clock is counting down to E3 2013, where, if past history is anything to go by, Microsoft will likely unveil its next-gen machine.

Xbox 720 Price

If the PS4 comes to market in the UK this year, Microsoft are likely to make every effort to get their next-gen console onto retailers’ shelves at around the same time.
With the Xbox 360, Microsoft released several variants with differing onboard storage options, which in turn, dictated the retail price point.
At the cheapest end, the entry price in the UK was £209.99. Taking this as a ballpark figure makes sense in light of a 2010-dated document that surface last year, stating the planned RRP of the new Xbox console would be around £200.
If that ends up being the case, this would make the Xbox 720 the cheapest next-gen console on the market.

Xbox 720 Specs

In January of this year, VGLeaks, published what it claims were technical specifications of the next-gen Xbox console, originally leaked under the codename Project Durango.

According to the information published on the site - and this is by no means official - the next Xbox will be powered by an 8-core CPU running at 1.6GHz, alongside 8GB of DDR RAM.

The machine also boasts a custom 800-MHz graphics processor, which "can effectively issue 1.2 trillion floating-point operations per second".
The console also contains 8GB of RAM and a Blu-ray disc drive, which can read 50GB discs, 32 MB of fast embedded SRAM, as far as its connectivity goes, it has Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct networking.
The full 'leaked' specs are as follows:

CPU:

- x64 Architecture

- 8 CPU cores running at 1.6 gigahertz (GHz)

- each CPU thread has its own 32 KB L1 instruction cache and 32 KB L1 data cache

- each module of four CPU cores has a 2 MB L2 cache resulting in a total of 4 MB of L2 cache

- each core has one fully independent hardware thread with no shared execution resources

- each hardware thread can issue two instructions per clock

GPU:

- custom D3D11.1 class 800-MHz graphics processor

- 12 shader cores providing a total of 768 threads

- each thread can perform one scalar multiplication and addition operation (MADD) per clock cycle

- at peak performance, the GPU can effectively issue 1.2 trillion floating-point operations per second

High-fidelity Natural User Interface (NUI) sensor is always present

Storage and Memory:

- 8 gigabyte (GB) of RAM DDR3 (68 GB/s)

- 32 MB of fast embedded SRAM (ESRAM) (102 GB/s)

- from the GPU’s perspective the bandwidths of system memory and ESRAM are parallel providing combined peak bandwidth of 170 GB/sec.

- Hard drive is always present

- 50 GB 6x Blu-ray Disc drive

Networking:

- Gigabit Ethernet

- Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct

Hardware Accelerators:

- Move engines

- Image, video, and audio codecs

- Kinect multichannel echo cancellation (MEC) hardware

- Cryptography engines for encryption and decryption, and hashing

Microsoft has yet to confirm any of these specifications at the time of this writing.by nick cowen