Tuesday, September 19th 2023
Leak Suggests Next-Gen Xbox Planned for 2028, AMD Zen 6 & RDNA 5 Considered
A comprehensive leak of documents—from a FTC versus Microsoft case—has exposed short and long-term plans in the world of Xbox. It seems that a relatively mild refresh of current generation Xbox Series X and S is lined up for the second half of 2024, but presentation material (dated April 2022) also reaches far into the future with strategies for next-gen gaming hardware. The bigwigs at Xbox were projecting a "full convergence" of their proprietary "xCloud" gaming platform and physical console hardware to deliver "cloud hybrid games" for 2028—schemes and priorities could have shifted in the interim, given various legal challenges and takeover bids.
One of the slides points to Microsoft getting the technical nitty-gritty sorted by CY2023—with two main options presented for consideration: a licensed ARM 64 design or a "Zen 6-based" AMD 64 processor. The next-gen Xbox's GPU aspect could incorporate a Navi 5 design (RDNA 5)—weighing up either a co-operation with AMD, or an IP license of said graphics architecture. VideoCardz theorizes that: "the latter option seems more likely if the ARM 64 chip is chosen over the Zen 6 APU." A key goal in this area seems to be an implementation of "Next-Gen DirectX Ray tracing" and "ML-based Super Resolutions" features. A Neural Processing Unit (NPU) is marked as a key provision for the 2028 console—granting some nice-to-have perks including: latency compensation, frame rate interpolation and various enrichments of the user experience.
Sources:
The Verge, Tom's Hardware
One of the slides points to Microsoft getting the technical nitty-gritty sorted by CY2023—with two main options presented for consideration: a licensed ARM 64 design or a "Zen 6-based" AMD 64 processor. The next-gen Xbox's GPU aspect could incorporate a Navi 5 design (RDNA 5)—weighing up either a co-operation with AMD, or an IP license of said graphics architecture. VideoCardz theorizes that: "the latter option seems more likely if the ARM 64 chip is chosen over the Zen 6 APU." A key goal in this area seems to be an implementation of "Next-Gen DirectX Ray tracing" and "ML-based Super Resolutions" features. A Neural Processing Unit (NPU) is marked as a key provision for the 2028 console—granting some nice-to-have perks including: latency compensation, frame rate interpolation and various enrichments of the user experience.
19 Comments on Leak Suggests Next-Gen Xbox Planned for 2028, AMD Zen 6 & RDNA 5 Considered
Maybe they'll make something that is a hybrid of the two. My point if you can even call it that is its way too soon for any hardware specs to be taken seriously without a ton of salt.
From Mr. Xbox himself.
x.com/XboxP3/status/1704233222752571842?s=20
10. Years. Ago.
I can't remember what company was going to have have produced the Arm chips - possibly Nvidia?
Also locking the user into only being able to buy from a price-fixed online store...
The biggest difference between the ISA is the front-end and instructions decode of the CPU.
I remember Jim Keller in an interview a few years ago expressed, that he was disapointed it never saw the light of day.
And, more importantly, your game development is, to some extent, abstracted by the engine which is tasked with compiling your code to either x86 or ARM.
So PC + ARM consoles is not going to be an issue, truth be told current consoles APU are quite different than something like a 5600 or 7800X3D anyways so it's not like 1:1
For ARM in their 2028 Xbox, its just like risking their chances of success on hybrid cloud. No one wants a 360 situation where they couldn't access all the 360 games on Xbox One, Microsoft doing extra work for translation layers & virtualization/emulation, and the performance loss for back compatibility. Just why does Microsoft want to use ARM in their hardware? It couldn't be power efficiency.
Their GPU specs were finalized months before the launch, even Zen 2's development goes shorter than that 2 year finalization before release you mentioned. This could however speak of "games not using all the console hardware features".