What happened to your post that listed these rumors?
I actually do believe them..
Heres why ...
Those rumors talk about a radical new processor design that is backed by atleast 9 patents.
The guy on all those patents, Eric Mejdrich, started out at IBM then moved to MS 2 yrs ago. He's the architect for the chip design of the next xbox.
Other IBM distinguished engineers, some also on those patents, are now also at MS in the xbox devision.
MS also has some patents that leverage the same chip design, basically carrying on research with those chip designs.
The idea behind the processor is that its like stem cells. The basic unit is called a "Basic throughput engine (BTE)". It has a very simple scalable design that can be programmed to be specialized.
So when its manufactured you only need to FAB 1 design and test that 1 design. BUT when you assemble it on a SOC it can specialize to be several different components on that SoC.
This BTE can become a specialized in Physics processing, AI, Sound, Search, RayTracing, Animation etc. etc.
This BTE can also become something that specializes in processing Vectors, which the patents call a VTE, vector throughput engine.
I reiterate the fact that this one building block, BTE, can become specialzed to be so many things. And it only needs to be tested as a BTE.
This BTE needs huge amounts of memory, L1/L2 and RAM , to do its work. Traditionally what used to be done in software can now all stay on the hardware. So a games engine that needed to store a list of objects in a scene in RAM and managed by software, can do all that in the hardware and never leave the HW. It can just push these objects around the SoC via the huge pipes and processed thru the BTE's .
Another brilliant design around these BTE's is that they understand richer types of data structures, we can store rich objects, even trees of objects. All we need to do that is large amounts of memory and plumbing to allow the movement of these big chunks of data.
Again this all stays on the hardware, never leaving.
As a developer this is pretty amazing whats described in those several patents...
And 3 of those patents explicitly mention how it will achieve RayTracing, and the science/maths is there ... The HOW is explicitly explained, I do believe it is going to arrive in Xbox next..
Nothing out in the market comes close to what these new processors can do...
The CELL from IBM was a great processor by design, but in reality it was crazy hard to programme for. It did not have a great design around caching and object/object trees.
This design from IBM/Microsoft/AMD fixes all those failings of the CELL..
The magic around the new xbox, will be around this new processor architecture PLUS the software to make use of it. Basically MS could remove something that has been the pain point of game development for the last 2 decades, memory pointers. This chip will be shared memory across the entire SoC, all the components can share memory and pass the same rich object/object tree between them.
It can work on all objects within a scene per frame all on hardware never leaving.
If MS truly pulls this off, they will have a brilliant chip design for ALL there devices NOT JUST XBOX.
This chip will make its way into its phones, surface tablets, servers, desktops..
.... Its high stakes for MS .. they need there own chip for all the devices they plan on making in the future, its the only way they can truly own the entire experience from CHIP to OS, they never have to rely on dodgy chips from OEM's that take forever to release updated drivers that ultimately make there OS run crap! ..
MS wants to do chips ... trust me on that ...
Well, I do agree with something that nobody here has given us.....
Nobody has explained why we have so many engineers from AMD, IBM, and Microsoft and they are only producing a console with a GPU of 1.2 TF, that has made no sense to me at all.
Think about this for a minute. Why would you have all of those people working on a console that is top secret to only produce a GPU of 1.2 TF and gimped speed of only using DDR3 memory.
I am not buying those rumors at all, because logically there has to be more too it. Maybe people are getting confused from developer kits and not the final hardware.
Think rationally and logically for a minute, why do we have all of these people and we know these people have plenty of patents and we know they are huge teams and we had AMD saying a couple of years ago that we would have "avatar" type graphics with Durango and hype or not they only said it about Durango and nobody else. Why do they have huge teams working on all of this if it's just going to be an average console?
I don't think that the final hardware is anything like the devkits.