Rumours suggest the new hardware will be based upon a custom version of AMD’s 6670 or 7000 series chipset, although sources are tipping more towards the cheaper 6670 (see below for specs). While this may sound disappointing for many gamers who are hoping for a truly next-gen console, look how far the 360 pushed its original hardware since release, when developers have fixed specifications, they can tweak their game engines over the years to realise the full potential of the hardware, something that doesn’t happen often on PC’s, where it’s easier to just throw more power at the problem.
A production run of the chips, be it (AMD’s 6670 or 7000 hardware) is said to be underway with Global Foundries and IBM for the first initial dev kits. The 360 Slim already features a ‘Vejle’ CPU/GPU combo processor, so it does make sense that Microsoft would go the same route of a combined GPU/CPU chip to keep costs down and performance up.
If the console makes it to stores for Christmas 2013, AMD will have already released its entire line up of HD 8000 series graphics chips, leaving the console at least two generations behind in terms of hardware.
AMD Radeon™ HD 6670 GPU Feature Summary
800 MHz engine clock
512MB-1GB GDDR5 memory
1000 MHz memory clock (4.0 Gbps GDDR5)
64 GB/s memory bandwidth
768 GFLOPS Single Precision compute power
TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture
480 Stream Processing Units
24 Texture Units
32 Z/Stencil ROP Units
8 Color ROP Units
128-bit GDDR5 memory interface
PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface
DirectX® 11 support
Shader Model 5.0
DirectCompute 11
Programmable hardware tessellation unit
Accelerated multi-threading
HDR texture compression
Order-independent transparency
OpenGL 4.1 support
Image quality enhancement technology
Up to 24x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing modes
As a child still in my 30's (but not for long), I spend my day combining my love of music and movies with a life-long passion for gaming, from arcade classics and retro consoles to the latest high-end PC and console games. So it's no wonder I write about tech and test the latest hardware while I enjoy my hobbies!