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Microsoft: Shaking Things Up
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Jostling with Nintendo for the second-place spot worldwide, Microsoft has a bit more impetus than Sony to tip its hand early. And so it is, with the Xbox Next ( for lack of an official name) set to debut at the San Jose Game Developers Conference ( GDC) in March 2004. ( You might recall that the original Xbox was announced at GDC 2000.)
The original Xbox was sometimes criticized for being little more than a slightly miniaturized PC -- it favored an off-the-shelf brute force approach over, say, the refined hardware elegance of a Dreamcast or GameCube. For Xbox Next, it´s not clear whether or not Microsoft will stick to its current strategy or design something a little more integrated. To generalize for a moment, it seems that Western gamers like, or at least have no problem with, the nature of the current Xbox architecture or form factor. On the other hand, the large size seems to be one of a number of reasons that adoption has been so abysmal in Asian countries.
What we do know is that Microsoft is going with completely different vendors to build the system. In August it announced that ATI would be supplying the graphics subsystem, a slap in the face to NVidia, the creators of the graphics chip of the current Xbox. This comes as no surprise, though, as rumors have long been flying that NVidia was grousing about certain aspects of its Xbox deal. Guess it won´t have to worry about that, now.
Now this is one sexy Xbox mock-up. Are you reading, Microsoft? A similar change seems to be taking place on the processor side, as Microsoft announced a deal in which IBM will develop semiconductor technology for future Xbox products. Taking this to its logical conclusion means that Xbox Next will be ditching Intel´s immensely popular x86 CPU architecture and going with IBM´s lesser-known PowerPC technology. While long-touted by Apple Computer advocates, PowerPC seems an ironic choice to power a super high-spec gaming machine by a company that helped make x86 a worldwide standard. We look forward to seeing how this works out . .. assuming the speculation is accurate, of course.
These new technologies raise an interesting question: Will Xbox Next be compatible with original Xbox games? Current rumors are saying no, which would be unfortunate now that Nintendo and Sony have set backward-compatibility precedents for " sequel" consoles. Further, will it come with a hard drive? Again, current rumors say no, at least not initially. ( This would be odd, since the HDD is one of the defining features of Xbox.) Hopefully, these and other questions will be answered at GDC, which is only a few short months away.
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