It's not bad at all. I suppose they're putting in 3 cores to make up for the pretty so-so GPU ATI supplied them with - but overall it definately looks nice, it's also good to see the large amount of RAM, it's too bad that a big portion of it is going to be shared with the GPU but console programmers always find a way to make it work together well.

It's definately not going to be as pretty as a PC, but if it comes even remotely close to looking as good as the last generation of PC games, I might just pick one up. Ah who am I kidding, I bought a PSP last month because I thought it looked cool, so I will probably get this too.

I just wonder if it's going to be semi-truck-huge?

Disclaimer: I work for The Man, but I'm in no way affiliated with the Xbox stuff, and officially have No Idea Whatsoever.

I was thinking a bit about the three core / 6 thread approach. Given the current push towards concurrency in programming and it being generally accepted that Most Of Us Are Bad At Concurrency, it might pan out as a useful generational thing - over the lifespan of the console, developers will progressively get better at using the cores efficiently, so we might find that games in 2009 are three times as fast. Heck, six or eight times as fast - it's a stable platform that can be optimized for. Mmmm. Optimized.

Of course, we (M$) might just ship it with one core and single threading enabled, and then enable one new core each year for subscribers only :)

That's a *joke*, dammit.

Ray: on Semi Truck Huge - depends on whether the size of the headset model shown below is One Standard Head, or Face of Boe sized.

Xbox Head Thing
http://img.engadget.com/common/images/1488407751772606.JPG

Face of Boe
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/episodes/photostories/02aliens/31.shtml

Hahaha, I was only poking fun at the current gen XBox - I actually think the new XBox is very nice looking, even if it is a bit larger than the competition. I really don't mind about the size, because I think it has a lot to offer and I will probably get one.

I'm especially excited at the fact that Hironobu Sakaguchi has come over to Microsoft, as his games were originally the only reason I bought a PS2 (He's the Final Fantasy creator fyi). I have since bought other PS2 games of course, but FFX was the sole reason for the original purchase. And now that he's with MS, I can see only good things coming from it. Granted, Square-Enix owns the Final Fantasy name, but I have no doubt that Sakaguchi can come up with some spectacular ideas for games on the XBox.

Now, I'm a die hard PC gamer through and through, but I'm excited about the upcoming generation of consoles, I can't wait to see what new RPG games they bring to the table since consoles is absolutely where I go to get my RPG fix.

I hope, and expect, the '3 cores' they refer to arent as most people are imagining. That they have specific functions, one CPU, on FPU and another that is multimedia or whatever. I don't see them having 3 normal CPUs in the device simply because games have historically not gained any advantage from a multicpu layout, just ask Carmack. He tried adding SMP support in both Quake3 and Doom3 with lackluster results, and he is *the* game engine poet.

Also, one last thing (sorry for the comment spam!) I highly doubt that the RISC processors inside are running at 3.2GHz a piece. One thing that leads to believe this is the fact that IBM's other top-of-the-line RISC processors are nearly a full GHz slower. I think that all of them combined run at a speed of 3.2 GHz or 1066.6 MHz each. Or a combination of clock speeds to equal 3.2GHz.

I would also assume that one of the cores is dedicated to physics/maths and is clocked accordingly, and another core is probably dedicated to regular tasks, and the third is probably some sort of multimedia core - probably shares some processing with the GPU and the audio DSP's.

This is all speculation of course, but I think it's probably more likely than not.

I *SO* beat you to that...

Pretty good coverage on the Xbox 360 launch so far, especially the blurb from TeamXBox. I was...