Some of you have been waiting a while to see what will make up the XBOX 2 hardware and here they are....... The Guts of the Next Box CPU - Xenon's CPU has three 3.0 GHz PowerPC cores. Each core is capable of two instructions per cycle and has an L1 cache with 32 KB for data and 32 KB for instructions. The three cores share 1 MB of L2 cache. Alpha 2 developer kits currently have two cores instead of three. GPU - Xenon's GPU is a generation beyond the ATI X800. Its clock speed is 500 MHz and it supports Shader 3.0. Developers are currently working with an alpha 2 GPU. Beta GPU units are expected by May and the final GPU is slated for a summer release. The final GPU will be more powerful than anything on the market today; in game terms, it would handle a game like Half-Life 2 with ease. System Memory - Xenon will have 256 MB of system RAM. Keep in mind that this number should not be equated to typical PC RAM. The Xbox has 64 MB of system RAM and is a very capable machine. Optical Drive - As many have speculated, Xenon will not use Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Games will come on dual-layer DVD-9 discs. While the media is the same as that of the current Xbox, the usable space on each disc is up to 7 GB. The drive is slated to run at 12X. Memory Units - Xenon will use 64 MB to 1,024 MB memory cards. 8 MB is reserved for system use, leaving a 56 MB to 1,016 MB for user data. Hard Drive - As many have speculated, Xenon's hard drive is optional. 2 GB of the drive will be used as game cache. The final drive size is still being determined. Camera - Xenon will have a USB 2.0 camera. It's capable of 1.2 megapixel still shots and VGA video. Photos can be used in-game and for gamer profiles. The camera can also be used for video chat. It's unknown if the Xenon camera will allow for EyeToy-like gameplay. Developers are currently using a simulated camera driver. Sound Chip - Xenon does not have an audio chip in the traditional sense. Decompression is handled by hardware, while the rest of the chores are handled by software. DirectSound3D has been dropped in favor of X3DAudio. The former was deemed too inflexible. Credit to gamespy

With this and the new "cell" chips for the PS3, why are consoles going to be much, much faster than PC's shortly? Or will Intel and AMD surprise us with completely new core architectures? Lol, I hope so :P Zee. AMD Athlon 2800+ barton @ 12.5 X 176 : 2200mhz 512Mb Corsair RAM MSI KT6 Delta mobo Leadtek AGP 6600 gt 128Mb 120Gb Seagate HDD

All this talk about xbox 2 (xenon) makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Any word on backward compatibility?

I heard many diff things on backward compatibility for the Xbox 2. First I heard it wasn't going to have it a year ago and recently I heard that it was going to have it. I think it will have it because there are a lot of good titles on the Xbox and for Microsoft not to have backward compatibility for Xbox 2 would cost Microsoft sales and lets face it, Microsoft needs to hold onto every fan that they have to try to stay in the same league as Sony. I read that the 256mb is a special type of ram made for highend graphics and it is suppose to be more powerful then DDR3 that are currently on the top of the line graphics cards. So I suspect that the ram in the XBox 2 system is DDR4 since the grpahics card is a generation ahead of any graphics card using DDR3.

Thanks for the reply cobra, I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Here is what gets me though. The PS3 is suppose to be more powerful then the XBOX 2, and Microsoft has done a complete 180 since the XBOX. The XBOX was known for it's powerful system thus why people bought it but now Micrsoft is focusing more on the user interface then having the most power out of all of the consoles. Their new catch phrase is. "power doesn't mean everything" So this is going to be interesting to see how this plays out for Micrsoft. It's user interface vs power.

just get an emulator and these games will run tons better ont he pc