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Microsoft’s next Xbox to feature AMD Jaguar processing power

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Sony has already announced its next-generation PlayStation 4, but Microsoft is still yet to formally announce its next console. An Xbox event has been rumoured to be taking place on May 21st ahead of a full announcement at E3 in June. Of course, the tech journalists of the world have been working overtime to find out what they can about Microsoft’s new console and some have struck pay dirt.

According to a report from Bloomberg, the as-of-yet-unnamed next-generation Xbox will be powered by a “Jaguar” chip made by AMD. Jaguar will be an x86 system-on-chip, with an architecture common to desktop computers (and some mobile devices like the Surface Pro and laptops), over the PowerPC architecture used in the Xbox 360.

This change in architecture means that Xbox 360 titles likely won’t be able to be played by the new console, unless emulation is done through software – a difficult challenge. This mirrors the PlayStation 4, which is moving from a custom CELL processor to the same AMD Jaguar x86 system-on-chip.

Earlier this year specifications for the next Xbox were reported to include a 64 bit D3D11 GPU running at 800 MHz, an eight-core 1.6 GHz CPU with 4 MB of L2 cache, 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, 500 GB of on-board memory, USB 3.0, HDMI and 50 GB discs. That’s a bit behind the PlayStation 4, which has 8 GB of DDR5 RAM.

What do you make of the specifications? We cannot wait for PC games to progress once the new consoles are out – a lot of people forget that the PCs are held in check by multi-platform releases that need to play well on age-old consoles, so with new consoles will come new standards for graphical fidelity on PC too!