New reports have originated regarding Microsoft’s upcoming and highly anticipated Xbox 720, and this time the rumor mill states that the new Xbox could allow players to scale up or down their Xbox similar to the way PC gamers do with desktops, by removing and adding components.
The news surfaced after application 20120159090 was submitted in December 2010 at the U.S. Patents and Trademark Office, and was published only last month.
As per the application, Microsoft is trying to patent "versions of a multimedia computer system architecture... which satisfy quality of service (QoS) guarantees for multimedia applications such as game applications while allowing platform resources, hardware resources in particular, to scale up or down over time."
The report also stated that the patent depiction and the associated images share the same fundamental ideas as the "Yukon" system, which was covered briefly in the Xbox 720 documents that appeared towards the beginning of May. Many dedicated sites related to the issue confirmed those documents as genuine, dating them back to August 2010, just months before this patent was submitted to the U.S. Patents and Trademark Office.
However, the new patent actually goes further than the 720 leak, which was shown in the leaked documents. The patent has detailed a base architecture consisting of core components, similar to the way the PCs are built around core components like motherboards, PSUs, RAM modules, and expansion cards. It has also described a multi-CPU, multi-GPU system in which one combo is reserved for the Xbox platform (dashboard, video encoding/decoding) and the other being reserved for applications (gaming).
What this does is that it backs up the "transmedia gaming" description in the Xbox 720 leak which revealed Microsoft's plans for running apps simultaneously with games. Examples included running a TV stream while gaming, and opening a strategy guide while the game is still running. One hardware combo would handle the game while the other hardware combo would handle the strategy guide app (something to do with a Web browser?).
Further speculation states that this dual-system customizable console setup could lead to multiple configurations from OEMs much like we see with desktops and laptops. Moreover, the "over time" could mean that Microsoft is actually wanting to remove itself from the traditional fixed architecture model as gamers have seen from the very beginning.
Stay tuned for more updates on this.
(Source: Eurogamer)
