Microsoft’s new Xbox has a name, and it is dubbed Xbox 360.  Earlier I gave a preview of the new Xbox, although the known hardware requirements haven’t changed since the announcements have become official, there were a few unknowns when I last wrote on the Microsoft’s “Next Box”.  Price, backward compatibility to existing Xbox games and the exact graphics processor were still a mystery.  The details of the graphics processor have come out but we’ll have to wait on a price quote and the big question of backward compatibility.

What will this new Graphics Processing Unit consist of?  We know it’s created by ATI who garnered the contract to fill the new Xbox with its GPU, beating out Nvidia the undisputed heavyweight in the graphics world who provided Xbox Classic its GPU.  We anxiously waited to see how the specs of the new Xbox GPU would differ from ATI’s top end Radeon GPUs for PC. 

The new ATI GPU will have some advanced never before seen features.  The 500MHz graphics chip will feature “48-way parallel floating-point dynamically-scheduled shader pipelines”, seriously, that’s a mouthful.  To give an example of how groundbreaking this will be most high end GPU’s have 16 pipelines.  ATI’s new concept is the unified shader that can process vertex and pixels through the same pipeline.  Today’s PC video cards divide these operations through separate pipelines.  ATI’s Radeon X850 XT PE graphics chip is ATI’s current top shelf model and features 16 pixel pipelines and 6 vertex pipelines.  Although we have yet to see this new GPU in action I’m sure we’ll see frame rates to lay an old school whoopin’ to anything that exists on store shelves today.  The over the top graphics specifications are going to be put to good use as Microsoft has already placed a 720P requirement to developers for the 360.  This means gamers with an HDTV will look forward to ALL games on the 360 supporting at least 720P.

Why does Microsoft choose to release the new box so early?  Xbox is still the latest and greatest of the gaming platforms, if not from a developer’s perspective (Microsoft has yet to gain the interest of some venerable Japanese games developers to the Xbox) the hardware beats its closest rival PS2.  With new optical storage standards on the horizon (HD-DVD and Blu-Ray) one has to wonder if Microsoft isn’t releasing 360 a little too soon.  Is Microsoft striking at just the right time?  Or is this going to be Microsoft’s Dreamcast?