Durango tech specs leaked in full, Orbis detailed - rumour

The next Xbox console, codenamed Durango, and its rival PlayStation 4, codenamed Orbis, are the subject of yet another round of industry whispers, this time getting even more detailed on both machines' innards.

The information comes from VGLeaks, but matches up with and is expanded by information received by Eurogamer, and is said to concern development kits not more than nine months old.

According to this latest report, which agrees with many previous leaks, the new Xbox has an eight-core CPU from AMD running at 1.6GHz, based on Jaguar tech.

So far, so Orbis, but where Durango differs is its memory set up. The report claims it has 8GB of DDR3 and 32MB of ESRAM, with the two memory kinds working together to produce throughput of 170GB/s. The ESRAM is accessible by other components, not just the console's graphics core, potentially making it more flexible and easy to develop for as the hardware ages.

Durango is said to have a number of dedicated hardware accelerators. A couple are devoted to audio and another to video encoding, suggesting Microsoft intends to continue ramping up its media box efforts, and there's also a couple of Data Move Engines which nobody has any theories about as yet.

Kinect appears to have its own input rather than be built in, and Durango will be USB 3.0 compatible, with a 500GB harddrive as minimum and a 6x Blu-ray drive.

Again lining up with past rumours, the Orbis is said to have more raw computational power than the Durango - although its what you can do with the power that counts, of course. The report reiterates this power imbalance by claiming the next PlayStation has 18 Radeon GCN compute units at 800MHz (1.84 teraflops in total), while Durango has just 12 of the same speed (1.23 teraflops in total)..

If you're technically minded, visit both links above for more detailed analysis of the new consoles' gizzards.

We're expecting reveals of the next consoles from Sony and Microsoft this year, and perhaps even to see the hardware launch before the holidays. A recent comment from Sony boss Kaz Hirai suggests Microsoft may go first.

Thanks, Telepathic.Geometry.