Tomorrow night at 9:30 PM EST on MTV, the next-generation Xbox (which is more than likely going to be named Xbox 360) will be revealed to the world.  With it being so close, I can't think of anything to do, except wait with baited breath and hope that the show won't be made up of 15 minutes of celebrity bullshit and then 5 minutes of actual gameplay and footage of the console itself, although I think that is going to end up being the case.

Anyways, while we're all waiting for the special and the first concrete details on the next Xbox, check out a few of the specs on Xbox Live and the console itself that I snagged on the Team Xbox forums.

2 types of Xbox Live:
Xbox Live Silver (no subscription required)
Xbox Live Gold (subscription benefits)

Features for Gold service
* Also for Silver
# Also for Offline

– Seamless transition to Xbox Live account from Xbox to Xbox 360
– Access to MMOs (additional fees may apply) *
– Free Xbox Live weekends *
– Multiplayer online gameplay
– Avatar for gamer profile * #
– Motto for gamer profile * #
– Personalized look for Xbox System Guide * #
– Offline achievments * #
– Online achievements *
– Access to other players' Gamer cards via Live *
– Cumulative gamer score * #
– Location/language profile * #
– Reputation *
– Enahnced matchmaking using above
– Skill level matchmaking
– Gameplay style profile (casual, competitive, etc.)
– Recent players list *
– Free and premium download game content *
– Free and premium downloadable movies, music, tv *
– Downloadable demos/trailers *
– Microtransactions *
– Custom playlist in every game * #
– Play music from portable devices * #
– View images from digital camera * #
– Strem media from Windows XP * #
– Interactive screen savers * #
– Track info for CDs * #
– Communication with voice, video or text *

360 HW:
1. Support for DVD-video, DVD-Rom, DVD-R/RW, CD-DA, CD-Rom, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 cd, JPEG photo CD
2. All games supported at 16:9, 720p and 1080i, anti-aliasing
3. Customizable face plates to change appearance
4. 3 USB 2.0 ports
5. Support for 4 wireless controllers
6. Detachable 20GB drive
7. Wi-Fi ready

Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
– 3 symmetrical cores at 3.2 GHz each
– 2 hardware threads per core
– 1 VMX-128 vector unit per core
– 1 MB L2 cache

CPU Game Math Performance
– 9 billion dots per second

Custom ATI Graphics Processor
– 500 MNz
– 10 MB embedded DRAM
– 48-way parallel floating-point shader pipelines
– unified shader architecture

Memory
-512 MB GDDR3 RAM
– 700 MNz DDR

Memory Bandwidth
– 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
– 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
– 21.6 GB/s frontside bus

Audio
– Mulitchannel surround sond output
– Supports 48khz 16-bit audio
– 320 independent decompression channels
– 32 bit processing
– 256+ audio channels

Of course, all this stuff isn't confirmed, so take it all with a huge grain of salt.  If true though, very good things indeed are coming.

-Jack

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BreakmanX (AKA Matthew Nyquist) founded BreakmanX.com in 2001 after having small video game websites since around 1996. Things really took off in September of 2002 when he started The Game Show with Richie. BreakmanX.com quickly developed a tight knit community of gamers as the crew covered major industry events and interviewed top industry talent. Break later went to the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts to get his MFA in Film and TV Production. He worked in Hollywood for seven years with people like Fred Roos (The Godfather Trilogy, Star Wars) and Dane Davis (The Matrix). He's now gone full circle and returned to Kansas to write and direct a feature film (EyesOpenMovie.com), relaunch The Game Show (BreakmanX.com), and spend his day time hours as an tenured Associate Professor.

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