Well take this with a huge bucket of salt, but according to a insider over at Microsoft who read some documentation on the taxes on the Slim model, the next Xbox will be announced later this year, and will be 5 to 6 times more powerful than the recently rumored PlayStation Neo. Microsoft Xbox chief, Phil Spencer was quoted saying that the next Xbox will be a significant upgrade, and this rumor plays into the leaked information.
I got to read some slides from Microsoft and AMD about the new Xbox, and it is in effect a new model, not a remake of the Xbox One. They should announce this year at a separate event from E3 2016, but still a few days before the fair. The announcement will be made this year but the release of the Xbox neXt is not expected before next spring, to read the roadmap. It will be open to change hardware, I did not understand if via upgrade or if they spoke of changes that will operate on the fly, before the release. It will be extremely powerful from the start, i think 5-6 times PS4 Neo, then something in the order of over 10 TFLOPS or so.
I can guarantee that the new Xbox One is in pre-production, AMD has signed three new agreements for this year and one last year. What the past year concerned the tax for the Slim model of One SoC, what this year covers three big industry, Microsoft including for the new console. Four agreements, three only for this 2016.
One was a definite step forward as chipset, still it has not been exploited even at 80% and there are still room for improvement to get the most from the current consoles, but talking with the Xbox team developers has noticed have focused too much on innovation and less on strength, then i can tell you even now that will be a cross between one and a stark PC, if we count the numbers. i mean that everything will be balanced, as the current One, but each element will be provided with great power starting from the system to the integrated HBM DDR4 memory in GPU. There will be the exhaust chip, but for the lazy dev you can also bet on the computational power without incurring large compromises, the the opposite situation to that of One. Panos Panay is overseeing the project and aesthetics of the console, I think it will be amazing.
The chip is based on Arctic Island family of AMD’s 14-nanometer FinFET or Polaris-11 Vega, GCN 4.0 in production for this summer, will be custom-class, x86-x64 and always backward compatible with either 360 with One, in fact, the operating system will always be virtualized; Win10 Redstone 2 is the core of the operating system of choice. it will be sold at a loss, these two years are working, almost immediately after the arrival of One.
I’ve heard that Spencer and the entire team wants to leave as soon as possible for the one spot he had with the old leadership, as if to mean a start from here like a zero year for us and for Xbox. They were not kidding, from which even the decision to end the production of Xbox 360 to focus on the new model.
With E3 around the corner, where Sony is widely expected to release the next iteration of the PlayStation, it remains to be seen whether or not Microsoft will answer this with their next Xbox. With the rumor stating that the next Xbox will be around 10tflops (the most powerful graphics card at the moment is 16tflops), one needs to remain quite skeptical, especially at the price points Xbox usually sells at.
