Xbox 360

Soon the much awaited first of the next gen gaming consoles will be with us. Reports of a release timeline of between Nov. 15 and Nov.30 have been announced by Microsoft and many wait for this to happen with much anticipation. While I won't be running out to buy a 360 as soon as it hits the shelf, I do see myself purchasing one after the new year. The price tag for the 360 is not light, at $499 CDN , I imagine that this will be on the wishlist for many a gamer this holiday season. There is going to be 2 different cosoles released. The above mentioned $500 console that comes with all the bells and whistles and the $400 vesion that comes with a more streamlined package. The cheaper version does not come with a 20Gb hardrive and also comes with a corded controller, the $500 version comes with a wireless controller and the 20GB removable HD as well as a universal multimedia media remote that can control your TV, DVD, and Windows Media CenterPC. Microsoft has plans for thee new OS, Longhorn, to be an integral part of the the 360 experience.
Here are some of the specs on the 360 compard to the original Xbox.

Xbox 360 System Performance Specifications

Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total
VMX-128 vector unit per core; three total
128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread
1 MB L2 cache

CPU Game Math Performance 9.6 billion dot product operations per second

Custom ATI Graphics Processor 10 MB of embedded DRAM
48-way parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
Unified shader architecture

Polygon Performance 500 million triangles per second

Pixel Fill Rate 16 gigasamples per second fill rate using 4x MSAA

Shader Performance 48 billion shader operations per second

Memory 512 MB of 700 MHz GDDR3 RAM
Unified memory architecture

Memory Bandwidth 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
21.6 GB/s front-side bus

Overall System Floating-Point Performance 1 teraflop

Storage Detachable and upgradeable 20GB hard drive
12x dual-layer DVD-ROM
Memory Unit support starting at 64 MB

I/O Support for up to four wireless game controllers
Three USB 2.0 ports
Two memory unit slots

Optimized for Online Instant, out-of-the-box access to Xbox Live features with broadband service, including Xbox Live Marketplace for downloadable content, gamer profile for digital identity, and voice chat to talk to friends while playing games, watching movies, or listening to music
Built-in Ethernet port
Wi-Fi ready: 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g
Video camera ready

Digital Media Support Support for DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, CD-DA, CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 CD, JPEG Photo CD
Ability to stream media from portable music devices, digital cameras and Windows XP-based PCs
Ability to rip music to the Xbox 360 hard drive
Custom playlists in every game
Built-in Media Center Extender for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
Interactive, full-screen 3-D visualizers

High-Definition Game Support All games supported at 16:9, 720p, or 1080i, with anti-aliasing
Standard-definition and high-definition video output supported

Audio Multi-channel surround sound output
Supports 48KHz 16-bit audio
320 independent decompression channels
32-bit audio processing
Over 256 audio channels

Physical Specs Height: 83 mm
Width: 309 mm
Depth: 258 mm
Weight: 7.7 lbs.

System Orientation Stands vertically or horizontally

Customizable Face Plates Interchangeable to personalize the console

That is it for this post. Look for more 360 news to come.