New XBox 360 on the way? M$ does it again!

[Maximus]

Firstly this has not been confirmed and could well turn out to be a hoax (can anyone say Photoshop with me).

Secondly in doing a system rehaul this early is like admitting defeat, it would be similar to Sony putting out a PS3 without a BD drive and selling it as an addon later.

While the transition to 65nm is a big milestone putting in an analogue to digital (the upconversion chip in the X360 is for analogue transmitions only) modulator chip could prove costly so the X360 will no go down in price, it could also cause some degradation in the purity of the digital signal from HDMI. Part of the reason why the PS3 can do HDMI so easily is that the signal is digital from start to finish, but in the X360 there is an upconversion stage which required analogue (hence no HDMI in the original incarnation).

I would expect Sony to combat this March 08 when they make the transition to 45nm (Sony are more than likely going to skip the whole 65nm generation) as the cost of the PS3 will have basically halved by then as B/V diodes will be cheap, and using half the silicon for one chip will basically double the yield/half the cost. They have already committed to removing legacy hardware in their next update of to console, and the BD drive will probably be thinner/smaller and we might see 1.8" drives used for HD storage. When this happens we will see a smaller PS3, call it a PS3 slim (like pstwo, psone). Krazy Kaz has already stated that Sony expect to be making a 5% margin on the PS3 by next Christmas (07), so that could lead to price cuts for the older PS3 $399 20GB and $499 60GB and $599 for the top of the line slim model when it gets released (March 08).

Please note that this is all guesswork and none of it is sourced and my own thoughts only.