We’ll have to wait well over a year to see if this rumors pans out, but sources in Singapore, which support an earlier Mercury News report, say that Microsoft’s manufacturing partners are already readying 45nm (nano meter) Xbox 360 CPUs. Right now, 65nm CPUs are found in the Xbox 360. Once Microsoft is able to shrink the size of the CPU enough, it can redesign the system all it wants. We’ve already seen what Microsoft originally has in mind for the 360, so I’m curious to see what Redmond can come up with. I’m all about the PS2 redesign, the PSTWO, the only system I actually own.
As with all rumors, Microsoft refuses to comment, one or the other, on this one’s veracity. We can speculate that, should Microsoft go through with the transition to 45nm CPUs—it just switched from 90nm to 65nm in the past few months—it’ll be sometime in 2008 or 2009 before we see any redesigns. By then, the 360 will be at least three or four years old, meaning we’ll be starting to hear about the next generation Xbox.
Microsoft Readying Redesigned 360? [Next Gen]
Not too concerned about any aesthetic redesigns unless it helps with the overheating issues, and 45nm is nice but I’m not going to wait that long to get my replacement 360. Does anyone have any confirmed info on when the 65nm will hit shelves? …er…or has it already and I’ve been uninformed?
From what I’ve been reading on the XBox forums (so take this with as many grains of salt as you want to), if you can find an Elite XBox360 with a manufacture date of July 2007 (or later, and not June!), then it will have the 65nm CPU and GPU, the new heatsink, and also new expoxy glue to keep the chips on the motherboard. But yeah, it’s all speculation until you have it in your hands I think. :)