Nintendo has already talked a lot about the Wii U. Conversely, both Microsoft and Sony are keeping pretty quiet about their next generation consoles. As far as Microsoft is concerned, we do have some details, such as the fact that it's codenamed 'Durango,' and that it might ditch the optical drive, but we're holding out for some good old fashioned leaks to help us out with the rest of the juicy details.
This past weekend, our hopes were raised high, as one person on the web claimed to be selling an Xbox 720 Durango devkit. The devkit in question cropped up on a game dev forum (AssemblerGames) with a price tag of $10,000. Eurogamer's Digital Foundry reached out to the source and then followed up with multiple developers working on next-gen projects. According to what Digital Foundry heard back, this really is a Durango devkit we're looking at. Of course, it's worth noting that the Xbox 720 probably won't look anything like this -- this is just the cobbled-together hardware sent out to developers so they can get the ball rolling. Still, it could give us some idea of what to expect, specswise, from the new Xbox.
The person responsible for the leaked images goes by the name of DaE and has since been banned from the AssemblerGames forums after it emerged his sale posting was a prank played on the owner of the boards. However, the fact remains that the image he used for that posting were apparently legitimate, and Digital Foundry says that after speaking to him, that he has had access to the devkit.
So, the pics are legit, but what else do we know? Well, Digital Foundry says DaE believes the devkits (dispatched in February) feature an Intel CPU, an Nvidia graphics card (he didn't specify beyond that), more than 8GB of memory, and that it's 64-bit in nature. DaE says Microsoft is actually aiming for an eight-core CPU, but this information has not been verified.
For more pictures and the full story, hit up Eurogamer's Digital Foundry.
