Xbox 360 News

Allard is all about uphill climbs. He helped drive Microsoft's entry into the Internet arena in 1994 and, in 1999, persuaded Bill Gates to build a videogame console and take on the powerhouse of the gaming business, Sony. Now, after a six-year ascent, Allard claims he can finally see the crest of the hill.

Goldman Sachs expects the Home and Entertainment division of Microsoft to break even at the end of fiscal 2007. The research outfit said that this "will depend on competitive pricing by Sony, but we feel this is probably about right, resulting in the elimination of about a 5% drag on overall Microsoft earnings."

Goldman Sachs expects Microsoft will move approximately 3 million Xbox 360 units in the December quarter, "with demand exceeding supply". Goldman noted that the console could be sold at a retail price that is more than it had expected.

The Dashboard, which can be customized using themes, offers access to four main panels: System, Games, Media and Xbox Live.

System contains standard configuration options for the Xbox 360, including linking up with network devices and setting parental controls. The action starts from the Games panel, which displays the user's GamerCard containing their reputation, Gamerscore and Zone.

Each kiosk had a wired Xbox 360 controller connected to it, running into the base of the kiosk that only had one small window showing off a Xbox 360 console.

But the console itself wasn't on, looking at the right of the kiosk you get to see the actual power behind the demos:



A pair of Apple Powermac G5 systems were actually running the Xbox 360 demos, not the 360 console. The consoles in the kiosks weren't actually running, they were just for show - now you know why all the controllers were wired.

Ok, let’s stop this right now. There is some serious wrong information floating around, so I need to clear this up. I grabbed my favorite PR dudes, and they are saying what I was telling a few of you in email:
“We’re not sure where this came from, and is incorrect. At launch, Xbox 360 will be backward compatible with the top Xbox games. Our goal is to have every Xbox game work on Xbox 360. You will NOT need to purchase a new ‘version’ — your original games will work on Xbox 360.”

You should of course understand that this article has been written and made by Microsoft and not by an independent source or so - but it can still be an interesting read nonetheless.
Here's the summary:

There are three critical performance aspects of a console:
- Central Processing Unit (CPU) performance:

The Xbox 360 CPU architecture has three times the general purpose processing power of the Cell. Cell's claimed advantage is on streaming floating point work which is done on its seven DSP processors.

- Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) performance:
The Xbox 360 GPU design is more flexible and it has more processing power than the PS3 GPU. In addition, its innovated features contribute to overall rendering performance.