The controller is about the only thing we don’t know anything about

A complete technical breakdown of the innards of the next generation Xbox has reportedly been leaked online, revealing just how powerful the console is.

Rumours about the next gen Xbox’s hardware, nicknamed the Xbox 720 by fans, have leaked before but not only are the details from website VGleaks the most detailed so far but the unofficial consensus from developers seems to be that they are genuine.

Within Microsoft the new home console is codenamed Durango and, according to not just this new leak, it has an eight-core AMD CPU running at 1.6GHz (and reportedly so does the PlayStation 4).

The Xbox 720 also has an 800 MHz graphics processor with 12 shader cores that provide a total of 768 threads and a peak raw processing performance of 1.2 teraflops. It also apparently has 8GB of DDR3 RAM and 32MB of superfast ESRAM.




The English translation for which seems to be that it’s very powerful, and on par with a high end PC. As previously rumoured the new console also uses a x6 speed Blu-ray drive and comes with a hard drive as standard – no doubt of varying sizes depending on which model you buy.

There’s no mention of how big the flux capacitor is

Other features visible on the above system diagram are a Kinect multichannel echo cancellation (MEC), although we’re sure no one doubted that there would also be a next generation Kinect. It does at least have its own input this time, and doesn’t have to use one of the USB 3.0 slots.

The Xbox 720 also has a HDMI 1.4a input, which suggests it can receive video signals from other devices – perhaps the already rumoured Xbox set-top box. Not everything on the system diagram is easily explainable though, even if you do speak computer-ese, with the block named ‘Data Move Engines’ remaining a complete mystery.

As with most of the more believable console leaks the question here is not so much whether the information is genuine but simply how old it is and whether anything has changed more recently. That may take a relatively long time to find out though as even if Microsoft do announce their new console in March or June they won’t necessarily reveal the full tech spec until much later.

So in the meantime here’s some light reading on just what it, allegedly, contains:

CPU:

x64 Architecture

8 CPU cores running at 1.6 gigahertz (GHz)

each CPU thread has its own 32 KB L1 instruction cache and 32 KB L1 data cache

each module of four CPU cores has a 2 MB L2 cache resulting in a total of 4 MB of L2 cache

each core has one fully independent hardware thread with no shared execution resources

each hardware thread can issue two instructions per clock

GPU:

custom D3D11.1 class 800-MHz graphics processor

12 shader cores providing a total of 768 threads

each thread can perform one scalar multiplication and addition operation (MADD) per clock cycle

at peak performance, the GPU can effectively issue 1.2 trillion floating-point operations per second

High-fidelity Natural User Interface (NUI) sensor is always present

Storage and Memory:

8 gigabyte (GB) of RAM DDR3 (68 GB/s)

32 MB of fast embedded SRAM (ESRAM) (102 GB/s)

from the GPU’s perspective the bandwidths of system memory and ESRAM are parallel providing combined peak bandwidth of 170 GB/sec.

Hard drive is always present

50 GB 6x Blu-ray Disc drive

Networking:

Gigabit Ethernet

Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct

Hardware Accelerators:

Move engines

Image, video, and audio codecs

Kinect multichannel echo cancellation (MEC) hardware

Cryptography engines for encryption and decryption, and hashing

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