Xbox 720 specs leaked

Posted: 24 Jan 2013 10:14 AM PST

These are the most detailed set of specs for the Xbox 720 yet released and they originated from VGleaks so they’re being taken more seriously than most and the consensus among developers seems to be that they are genuine.

The next generation Xbox's hardware, nicknamed the Xbox 720 by fans, codenamed Durango by Microsoft has long been suspected of sporting an eight-core AMD CPU running at 1.6GHz (and reportedly so does the PlayStation 4).

The Xbox 720 / Durango also boasts an 800 MHz graphics processor with 12 shader cores providing a total of 768 threads and a peak raw processing performance of 1.2 teraflops. It also apparently has 8GB of DDR3 RAM (double that of the PlayStation 4) and 32MB of superfast ESRAM.

This all means 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. The specs suggest a device that’s very similar in many respects to the previously leaked PS4 (code-named Orbis). If anything, the Xbox 720 might come up a little short of the PS4 in terms of pure graphical power, but it has a couple of other tricks up its sleeve.

Speaking of which, the main point of differentiation between the two next-gen consoles here would appear to be the GPU. The Xbox 720′s 12-core GPU appears to lag behind the PS4′s 18-core example by quite a margin – at least on paper.

Other interesting snippets from this report include the claim that the Xbox 720 will feature a Blu-ray drive, as well as a fixed hard drive (the Xbox 360′s has always been removable).

The console will also feature what appears to be an accelerated hardware video encoder and an HDMI input. This would open the possibility of recording TV content from your dedicated set-top box to your new console. You could also import footage from your camcorder directly to the Xbox 720 console.

Other features visible on the above system diagram are a Kinect multichannel echo cancellation (MEC), although 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:

The Xbox 720 specs

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: