According to Xbox World magazine, Microsoft began shipping devkits out to select developers back in March. Microsoft held a hush-hush developer’s conference in London on February 28, 2012 where they received the first devkits. The reason for the conference was to show European representatives they new hardware, codenamed Durango. A senior technical artist for Crytek tweeted that he was “enjoying the Durango developers summit in London. So far, great swag and interesting talks.” Microsoft held meetings for American developers at the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.
Xbox World states that current devkits are not going to mirror the appearance of the finale hardware. Rumor is that the console is set to ship in late 2013. Sources have revealed that the Durango devkit features a 16-core IBM PowerPC CPU, a GPU comparable to AMD’s Radeon HD 7000-series graphics card and Blu-Ray optical drive.
A source close to Xbox World said, “Even if you had a 16-core processor in your gaming PC there are currently no games built to use it, but games to the next Xbox could put all sixteen cores to work on day one for a level of performance far in excess of current gaming PCs. It’s a ridiculous amount of power for a games machine – too much power, even. But remember, Kinect 2 could chew up for whole cores tracking multiple players right down to their fingertips, so it’ll need a lot of power.”
A source at GDC has confirmed that developers are expecting Sony’s PlayStation 4 to be more powerful than the next Xbox and different studios are planning to unveil next generation software at E3 2012 in June, regardless if “Microsoft and Sony are ready or not.”
“Regardless of whether the next Xbox makes it to E3, the arrival of those Durango devkits is the starting gun for the next generation and once again Microsoft have beaten Sony out of the gate by getting hardware into the developers’ hands first,” the source said. “Sony keep denying any possibility of PS4 at E3 2012 too, but if they don’t make fast Microsoft could roll into June’s LA showcase with dozens of next-generation exclusives from third-parties. When Epic shows that first Unreal 4 demo they’ll only have one console platform to talk about – call it Durango, call it 720, call it what you like, but if Microsoft move fast it might be the only game in town.”
[Via Silligamer]