MS Thinking About Next Xbox

Preliminary work is "happening right now", according to Chris Lewis, because they "have to" constantly think about the next thing.

In two recent video interviews published on Kikizo with Xbox bosses Peter Moore and Chris Lewis, Microsoft has offered its thoughts on topics including the imminent movie format war, its position going into the PS3 launch window, and surprisingly, the next Xbox - admitting that work is "happening right now".

[Islandkiwi]

It means that MS really is in the console business for the long haul. I think that's great!

[zypher]

eh, just as long as they don't release the next Xbox until at least 2012 then i'll be cool. it would suck to have to purchase another XBox only 3-4 years into the current 360's life-cycle. good to see that they're planning for the future, as it means that they're in this for the long haul, thus my investment wasn't unjust. but i wonder; Sony took some major flack for forwardly thinking when they announced that they were research/developing for the PS3 barely months into the PS2's life. how will the media/fans respond to this from Microsoft, at not even a year into the 360's life?

[USMChardcharger]

obiviously sony didn't start soon enough. look how close they are cutting it with this one. (of course the cell research has to be considered, i know that)

you have to have some kind of game plan and soon. don't rest.

they can't sit there and say...you know, it has been 3yrs now...maybe we should start thinking about the next xbox.

even if they are 4, 5 , 6 years away. better to have a direction and a plan to excute when the time has come.

it's called a game plan...its called being smart.

and of course M$ is in for the long haul. they said they were. and yes they have lost money so far (everyone knows that was expected) but think how much money M$ as a company makes on a daily bases. the loss in the game department is a drop in the bucket.

[zypher]

i'm not refuting any of that. however, what will happen if in 3 years time they realize that they aren't making money with the 360? they did nothing but lose money with the original XBox (of which i actually bought two), and they dropped it like a bad habbit barely four years into its life-cycle. i don't want that to happen with the 360. obviously i support the 360 (otherwise i wouldn't have bought the system); but i also want Microsoft to help me support the 360 by keeping it around for a while longer than 4 years.

[shotty]

The next xbox would be released 5 or 6 years after xbox 360. So late 2010 ot 2011. Think about it in 5 years, there is a huge advancement in technology.

[Watapata]

To some degree you are right about the advancement in technology, but in terms of performance, advancment is starting to slow down, and to do so significantly. As an industry, electronics are getting to the point where about all that can be done is make things smaller, but even there the industry is running into diminishing returns because wire latency is becoming a problem and there is no way to work around it once you get the "wires" much farther than we're they are at already. In fact, wire latency goes up as size decreases because you start operating on individual atoms and there is literally no way to improve beyond that. In addition to this, you start running into problems with data being easier to get corrupted due to the size as well. This means that most of the gains are going to come in the form of parallelizing instruction set architectures even further and increasing the performance of memory. The eprformance of memory however has traditionally not gone up by nearly the levels that the public has seen general computing increasing since the 1980's. Basically what this means is that in 5-6 years you may see very little real performance increases for users because it may very well be that the only major changes are additional cores and more efficent microarchitectures.

[PS360PCROCKS]

"you may see very little real performance increases for users because it may very well be that the only major changes are additional cores and more efficent microarchitectures."

I'm sorry but wouldn't more cores and more efficient microarchitectures make for an improvement? I think if the next Xbox came out at christmas 2010 I'd probably buy it, that's 5 christmas's with the 360 and that's good enough for me...but than again I could be good with my 360 till 2020 if I had to be...anyways their will be no news on this at all for a long time, so I guess just watch the computer market and Microsoft you'll get a feel for whats going on, lol triple quad core processors, and the latest in everything else, probably DX 11-12 by than

[Watapata]

Yes, they WOULD make for an improvement, the question is whether or not the user will see this improvement. As fas as programming for this sort of architecture, you are talking about an entirely new paradigm shift regarding how a company will tackle software. Yes, multicore is available now, but on a fairly limited scale and essentially nothing is written to take advantage of them yet. In 5 years, you are not going to see that large of a change in this when you consider that programming has essentially been approached the same way for a fair while now. When it comes to efficiency, your average user would never see the difference and even your power user likely may not find it appreciable. Again, I'm not saying you won't see a drastic performance increase, but you have to accept the possibility needs to be tempered by the fact that diminishing returns are already upon the industry at the hardware level. Have you ever stopped to really think about why clock speeds have gone DOWN in the last few years? You can only optimize one thing so far before you have to move on, and hardware designers are running out of things to optimize...

[Yo Wassap]

By then maybe even organic computers would have started to evolve. Imagine that, a whole microchip in the form of a cell (organic one that is). It would be cheaper to manufacture and many times more powerfull. And maybe the next xbox will be for virtual gaming in the sense that you can actually feel, see and generally sense the environment that you're in. If you've seen the technology expos around the world you'll know that all the technology to do these operations exists already, it just needs to be improved and made more accessible.

Maybe i'm looking a little bit far into the future, but from the advancements in technology now; in say five years it might all be reality (a bit like flat screen hi-def televisions they were once the domain of movies a few years ago)

[shikwan]

Why are so many people upset if MS comes out with a new console in LESS than 10 years? Do you guys own pagers still from the 90's? How old is your Cell phone? Do you complain that your Cell phone you brought for $300 TWO YEARS AGO is now obsolete?

Technology is forever changing and you should be happy that a company will try to keep you up-to-date with the latest advances in technology.

4-5 years is reasonable for a new system. I don't expect to keep my brand new car any longer than that and my 360 will probably crap out on me by then anyway.

[Say's you]

The reason they called the 2nd Xbox,Xbox 360 cause they are starting where they first began from the first Xbox when it failed just like this one as well and they minus not start a 3rd one knowing Xbox Live! 3.0 would the same as Xbox Live! 2.0 from the 2nd Xbox "Duh!".

[NoMercy]

well thats too bad that the "Xbox" life-cyrcle is 4 years (after Halo 2 nothing good came) so the 360 will probably go for the same time as well IMO. GO GO PS2! it's stiil going after 6 years and is still going strong with great games till 2007! (if you don't believe me check IGN's PS2 game list)