Xbox 2 specs leaked?

Treat as rumour, but the latest leak from microsoft’s camp appears to be the specifications for both the Xbox 2 and its associated, revamped Live service writes sister blog Games Digest. And it makes for interesting reading…

Two varieties of Xbox Live are proposed, Gold and Silver, with Gold requiring a subscription.

Features for Gold service include (as well as all the stuff Silver Live users get): Matchmaking using player "Reputation", gameplay "style profile" and always on Xbox Live. Silver service users only get access to "Free Xbox Live weekends" as well as massively multi-player games if they pay their specific subscription fee. Both Gold and Silver users get a host of online and offline benefits on top though, including: game, movie and music downloads, mîcro transactions (for player-crafted items or new levels) and custom playlists for every game.

The full "leak" list

Gold Live benefits
Seamless transition to Xbox Live account from Xbox to Xbox 360
Multiplayer online gameplay
Enhanced matchmaking using Reputation
Skill level matchmaking
Gameplay style profile (casual, competitive, etc.)

Silver Live benefits
Free Xbox Live weekends
Access to massively multi-player online games (additional fees may apply)
Online achievements
Communication with voice, video or text
Free and premium download game content
Free and premium downloadable movies, music, tv
Reputation
mîcro transactions
Access to other players’ Gamer cards via Live
Recent players list
Downloadable demos/trailers

Benefits available offline
Avatar for gamer profile
Motto for gamer profile
Personalized look for Xbox System Guide
Offline achievements
Cumulative gamer score
Location/language profile
Custom playlist in every game
Play music from portable devices
View images from digital camera
Stream media from Windows XP
Interactive screen savers
Track info for CDs

General hardware specification
Support for DVD-video, DVD-Rom, DVD-R/RW, CD-DA, CD-Rom, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 CD, JPEG photo CD
All games supported at 16:9, 720p and 1080i, anti-aliasing
Customizable face plates to change appearance
3 USB 2.0 ports
Support for 4 wireless controllers
Detachable 20GB drive
Wi-Fi ready

The processor
Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
3 symmetrical cores at 3.2 GHz each
2 hardware threads per core
1 VMX-128 vector unit per core
1 MB L2 cache
CPU Game Math Performance: 9 billion dots per second

The graphics chip
Custom ATI Graphics Processor
500 MHz
10 MB embedded DRAM
48-way parallel floating-point shader pipelines
unified shader architecture

Memory
512 MB GDDR3 RAM
700 MHz DDR

Memory Bandwidth
22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
21.6 GB/s frontside bus

Audio
Mulitchannel surround sound output
Supports 48khz 16-bit audio
320 independent decompression channels
32 bit processing
256+ audio channels

Simon M