Next-Gen Xbox Rumored to Include Blu-ray and Dual AMD GPUs

As hard as it might be to believe, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 launched a staggering 6.5 years ago, and its follow-up isn’t expected to release until late 2013. Given the huge amount of time in between these releases, one would expect that the “Xbox 720” would be far more powerful and capable than its predecessor, and so far, that’s looking to be the case.

The CPU is rumored to feature four or six cores, though I’d lean towards the latter. One core will be dedicated to Kinect (which is said to ship standard) while the other will be for the OS. On a quad-core, that’d leave only two cores for gaming, and that doesn’t seem reasonable. For a next-gen console such as this, I believe we’ll see a six-core.

Following in the footsteps of Sony, the next Xbox is also rumored to use utilize Blu-ray storage. Of all the rumors surrounding the Xbox 720, this one seems the most plausible. Blu-ray is an established standard, and is cheaper than ever. It’d be foolish for Microsoft to adopt yet another standard that has higher up-front costs. Sony took the hit with the PlayStation 3, so Microsoft can reap that reward with its next console. 

For graphics, the rumor is that the Xbox 720 will feature not one, but two GPUs. Unlike a typical SLI or CrossFireX implementation though, each GPU will have the capability of rendering its own objects. On paper, there doesn’t seem to be a direct benefit to this over CrossFireX, but things would change if one GPU was more powerful than the other.

All of this sounds good so far, but there is just one line from VG24/7’s article that’s quite important, if true:

“Xbox 720 will require an always-on internet connection as an anti-piracy measure.“

It’s hard to believe that Microsoft would be considering this sort of implementation, but let’s not forget the other rumor that states the same requirement will be coming to Windows 8.