The gears are turning behind the scenes as we gear up for a new generation of games consoles. Sony’s been very open about its commitment to a PlayStation 5, and now word has emerged that development kits for the new Xbox Scarlett console are now in existence,

Over on Windows Central, Jez Corden has said the Xbox Scarlett development is codenamed ‘Anaconda’, “in-keeping with the reptile theme” said Corden. This falls neatly in line with the previous Scorpio and Chuckwalla codenames for the Xbox One X.

In terms of the hardware that’s going into this console, or family of consoles as it may ultimately end up, the pieces are beginning to fall into place. There is now mounting evidence that we’re looking at a custom AMD Navi GPU in Xbox Scarlett. It should be paired with a next-gen Zen 2 processor and the use of ultra-fast GDDR6 unified memory.

Should there be any truth to this leak, and Anaconda development kits are already in existence, we begin to get a picture of the potential timeframe for Microsoft’s next-gen console.

The use of familiar x86 architecture should make development on the new hardware pretty straightforward but developers are still going to need fairly significant lead-on time of 1-2 years to actually get content ready for the platform. To that end, a launch in 2020 of the next Xbox feels like the most likely scenario.

Is 4K/60fps going to be the accepted minimum threshold for Microsoft’s next-gen console? Are you expecting total backwards compatibility with Xbox One games? Can Microsoft regain the console crown once again? Let us know your thoughts below!