Microsoft reveals details of next-gen Xbox

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Today at the annual Game Developers Conference, Microsoft Corp. announced the first details of its next-generation Xbox video game system platform.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President J Allard outlined the company\'s vision for the future of entertainment, citing the emergence of an \"HD Era\" in video games that is fueled by consumer demand for experiences that are always connected, always personalized and always in high-definition.

J Allard said,

\"In the HD Era the platform is bigger than the processor. New technology and emerging consumer forces will come together to enable the rock stars of game development to shake up the old establishment and redefine entertainment as we know it.\"

Allard shared the first details about the next-generation Xbox guide. Persistent across all games and media experiences, the guide is an entertainment gateway that instantly connects players to their games, their friends and their digital media. Typifying the HD Era game experience, the guide requires hardware designed with software in mind.

System-level features of the guide such as custom playlists, the Xbox Live Friends list and voice chat are enabled at the chip level. The next-generation Xbox is designed around key principles that let developers maximize real performance, using concepts they are already familiar with.

The Xbox 2 hardware design principles include the following:

• Over a teraflop of targeted computing performance
• A multicore processor co-developed with IBM
• A custom-designed graphics processor co-developed with ATI

In addition, software technologies such as DirectX, PIX, XACT and the recently announced XNA Studio will allow the new hardware to help game developers unlock increasingly powerful and complex silicon.

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