Microsoft sets stage for Xbox 2

SAN FRANCISCO--You can dazzle 'em with technical details, but if you really want to get developers on your side, try giving away 1,000 flat-screen TVs.

That was Microsoft's strategy on Wednesday, as Vice President J. Allard offered a few details on the next version of the company's Xbox video game console during a speech at the Game Developers Conference here.

Allard showed a few software and online service changes planned for the next Xbox, code-named Xenon. In the main, though, he stuck to big-picture themes, particularly the shift of video entertainment to high-definition content.

TV programming, DVDs and other forms of video will all be dazzling consumers with HDTV content within a few years, Allard said, and video game creators will have to provide an equal level of visual detail and graphics razzle-dazzle to stay competitive.

"The trend is more than just resolution," Allard said. "It's going to change the way people play games."

To drive home the point, he concluded his speech by inviting a Samsung representative on stage to give away 1,000 HDTV sets.

Allard also gave a sneak peek at the unified interface that will be used by all next-generation Xbox games, which promises to provide a central location for players to connect over the Internet and to access music stored on the console. The interface will also serve as a gateway to a planned mini-transaction system that would enable players to buy small chunks of downloadable content, such as a new car for a racing game or fashion accessories for a character.

"You can sell a 5-cent tattoo, and not have to worry about the transaction cost," Allard said.

Allard had less to say on the technical side, saying Microsoft will spill the beans on Xenon on at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) trade show in May. He did promise that the main multicore processor being developed by IBM or Xenon will have plenty of horsepower.

"It will deliver over a teraflop (one trillion calculations per second) of targeted computing performance," he said. That performance would put it just a bit short of a modern supercomputer.

Allard also took a few digs at competitor Sony and its recent promotion of the Cell processor, which will power the next version of its PlayStation game machine. Allard suggested the novel design of Cell will be an obstacle to game developers.

"You can design your hardware to win at science fairs...and woo over electrical engineers," he said, "or you can design for developers."

"We designed the hardware with you in mind," he continued. "Our approach is Bruce Lee, not brute force."

[iceman2654]

desperate

This kinda shows how M$ is desperate to get attention to their Xbox.

Nope

It's called marketing and advertising. It's what companies do. It's obviously worked here. You read this article, so did I. I'm sure it will be reported in many other sites and mags too.

[Andrew J Glina]

Bruce Lee, not brute force

2 Processors
10 Processors

Which one is "Brute Force"?

[John Kuzak]

2 Processors

http://www.analogstereo.com/renault_laguna_owners_manual.htm

1 Teraflops + HDTV

This is purely hype!

As far as I know about the gamers world, most of them are fairly young (under 30) and don't have a HDTV in house. Even if they do, I would doubt if the onwer (mostly their parents) allow them to play with it. HD era is not coming on the gaming side; it's nice if XBox 2 can output that kind of graphics but, hey Microsoft, if you think everything in hi-def, you are totally wrong.

One teraflops is another marketing push. What on earth make you think 3 processors can provide that much power? Let's do simple math, 1 teraflops divided by 3 PowerPC processors would equal each performing at around 340 gigaflops. A single Cell - a 9-core chip on its own, have a max theoritical performance of 256 Gflops! According to Apple, a PowerPC G5 running at 2.5 GHz could achieve 9 GFlops. Because XBox 2 uses something new and faster (3.0 GHz), let's assume that each core of it can do 12 GFlops. Multiply by 3 and that brings things up to 36 GFlops, 28 times slower than what they promised. IBM didn't spend much money on the XBox 2 processors either, so there is no radical change in this PowerPC version. A major power boost is purely hype.

[Jeff Putz]

You don't know...

"As far as I know about the gamers world, most of them are fairly young (under 30) and don't have a HDTV in house."

You apparently don't know much about the audience then. Research shows the average game player age is 29. Furthermore, a console has to live and be relevant for four to six years on average. Look around... the TV's at Best Buy weren't there when the first Xbox was released. What do you suppose will be there two or three years into the next console's life?