Alleged Xbox 2 Specs Leaked

A document has leaked onto the Internet purporting to have been authored by Pete Isensee of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group (ATG). The document seems to contain the technical specifications for the next-generation Xbox and is more believable than previous such revelations largely because of what it leave outs, with many of the components being listed as “subject to change” and the question of the hard drive as standard remaining unanswered. The document outlines a system with three 3.5Ghz PowerPC G5 CPU cores, built onto one silicon die, a 500Mhz ATI graphics unit with a 10Mb on-board framebuffer and 256Mb of main RAM shared between the graphics unit and CPU system. Of particular interest is the suggestion that the ATI graphics unit will have the ability to read directly from the Level 2 cache on the CPU cores - effectively providing a 1Mb shared "scratch pad" which can be accessed from all three CPU cores and the GPU. The document also reveals that the GPU will implement a number of unique and powerful extensions to the pixel and vertex shader systems in DirectX 9.0 - including the ability for shaders to fetch directly from the console's main memory. The machine is also supposed to ship with a 100mb network socket (compared with a 10mb socket in the Xbox), USB2 sockets and four controller ports. Source: Xbox-Scene