Xbox 720 hardware detailed - Report

The rumours surrounding Microsoft's successor to the Xbox continue to mount, with one website claiming to have had access to the machine's specifications in full. According to technical documents acquired by VGLeaks, the console will feature an 8-core CPU, Blu-Ray, a DirectX 11.1-capable GPU and 8GB of DDR3 RAM.

The site also claims that the next Xbox's processor will feature an x64 8-core CPU with a clock of 1.6Ghz. Each "CPU thread has its own 32KB L1 instruction cache and 32KB L1 data cache", while both modules "of four CPU cores has a 2MB L2 cache resulting in a total of 4MB of L2 cache."

On top of that, "each core has one fully independent hardware thread with no shared execution resources" and "each hardware thread can issue two instructions per clock," according to the site.

Elsewhere in the document, the Xbox 720 - codenamed Durango - will allegedly feature 8GB of DDR3 RAM, a 6x Blu-Ray drive and 32MB of embedded SRAM.

The GPU will support DirectX 11.1, run at a core of 800mhz and feature 12 shader cores which provide "a total of 768 threads." The document reports that at peak performance "the GPU can effectively issue 1.2 trillion floating-point operations per second."

The document also claims that Microsoft's latest version of Kinect is always present, presumably indicating that the motion-sensor will be build into the machine itself.

Another point mentioned is that a SATA 2.0 "hard drive is always present", suggesting that Microsoft's next machine won't allow for optional hard drives in the way the Xbox 360 did.

Rounding off the rumoured specifications is support for HDMI 1.4a, 802.11n Wi-Fi and USB 3.0 alongside a bevy of codecs, multi-channel echo cancellation for Kinect and "cryptography engines for encryption and decryption, and hashing".

Microsoft is expected to formally announce its next Xbox within the next few months.

Elsewhere in next-gen rumours, last week it was reported that Sony's controller for the PlayStation 4 would include an LCD touch-screen and biometric sensors.