An Australian citizen, who allegedly was in possession of the Xbox One dev kit console well before its unveiling, back in December, is being tried in an Australian children’s court, Polygon reports.His chargesheet includes possession of identification material with intent to commit an offence, dishonestly obtaining or dealing in personal financial information, failing to obey a data access order, possession of a prohibited weapon, cannabis possession, possession of drug paraphernalia, possessing or copying an indecent or obscene article and possessing child exploitation material.

It’s a long list of alleged offences but the case has been adjourned till next month, and the defendant has not yet had a chance to plead either way. However, considering his history in the case- he supplied Kotaku with details on the Xbox One that all turned out to be completely accurate, at least as of then (mandatory Kinect, new controllers, multitasking, always online), it’s hard to see how this could end well for him. But we’ll see either way.

GamingBolt will have more for you on this as it develops.

This means launching applications and playing games while connected to the internet. For an example as to how this can negatively impact the console’s working, just take a look at recent news of Xbox Live going down and people being unable to access Netflix, Hulu and multiplayer. Now just extend that to all your games.

Then again, as Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski has mentioned, an always connected world is not far off. In fact with innovations such as 4G and LTE, not to mention Google Fiber making inroads throughout the United States, it’s not far-fetched to think that the whole world will be connected within the next 10 years. Then again, the Xbox 720 doesn’t need to cater to whole world. Just to markets that already enjoy the Xbox 360 or have an internet connection.

Leave aside the fact that we know nothing – repeat, nothing – about whether the Xbox 720 is always online or not. Heck, Microsoft could very well be working on some kind of system to benefit your games if you’re always online – but if you’re not, you can still enjoy the experience; just that it won’t be the same as if you were connected.

Think hot fixes that are commonly seen with some patches these days, whose benefits are gone when you exit the game or are unable to access them at the time. Maybe extending that to removing content from the game, unless you’re connected?

Completely possible, absolutely draconic, but again, just a rumour – like everything else we’ve heard about Microsoft’s next gen console.

The main crux of the argument is that always-online will be the death of the console. An always-online DRM helped Assassin’s Creed 2 PC lose about $50 million dollars. Let’s not even get into the SimCity debacle, wherein EA wanted to implement “social features” (read: sell you practically everything) to enhance/milk the experience.

One segment worries about the piracy; the other is trying to recoup the enormous amount of money spent on development somehow. But with Microsoft, it’s completely different.

The Xbox 360, after the release of Kinect, has transcended the need to rely solely on hardcore gamers and franchises. It’s fully made the transition to being a living room device that the whole family can appreciate and it’s done so far better than Sony.

Look at where the Move has gone from when it was introduced – the definitive motion gaming solution – to now, where it plays second fiddle to the DualShock 4 and can be used to create, of all the things, a puppet show.

Let’s not forget that the Xbox 360, whose biggest market is the United States, is now the top selling console for the 27th consecutive month in a row. If it stays on top for 9 more months, it will have been the top selling console for 3 YEARS in a row.

Coupled with evidence that plenty of gamers are pretty much online all the time anyway, in some form, with Xbox Live – not including all the casual users who use it for Netflix, social networking and the like – and it’s quite amazing to see the response to an always-online console be so venomous.

Remember those Xbox 360 first person shooter fans? The ones who make Call of Duty a success, year-in and year-out, and are the primary reason for Activision focusing all of its efforts on Microsoft’s console? You think they care about single-player? They’re always online anyway. A new console with the same requirement changes nothing.

Microsoft knows which audience it’s catering to – it knows the success it’s achieved, and how to strengthen and expand that market further.

And that’s not because they’re going to go always-online from here on out.

So whether you’re very happy about that or not – and as Thurrott states, “for me, Xbox 360 is almost entirely an online experience” – it’s going to happen.

He also spoke about when we’d be seeing the console. “Originally, they were going to announce this thing in April 24, now they’re going to announce it May 21. We know there are events occurring this year where we’re going to learn more about Durango.”

Of course, as far as release dates go, it only seemed to make sense that Microsoft would launch their console close to Sony’s PlayStation 4. Exactly how close would it be?

“Early November, yeah. E3 is going to occur. BUILD is going to occur in San Francisco in June when they’re going to talk about the developer story because it’s a Windows 8 device. It’s going to have the same, or basically the same, developer tools and developer APIs and all that kind of stuff.”

Remember, plans can change on the fly and Thurrott is still pretty much giving his own personal take based on what he knows. Take it with a grain of salt, but as we narrow down to E3, the Next Xbox is slowly but surly beginning to take shape.

One of the sources stated that, “Unless something has changed recently. Durango consumer units must have an active internet connection to be used.”

And it more or less confirms our worst fears when the source states that, “If there isn’t a connection, no games or apps can be started. If the connection is interrupted then after a period of time – currently three minutes, if I remember correctly – the game/app is suspended and the network troubleshooter started.”

Take it with a grain of salt, but so far, it’s still an uncomfortable possibility.

Coming off of Sony stating that you don’t need to be online to use the PS4, we have to wonder if Microsoft knows what it’s doing given the sour response always-online games have had.

According to a Senior developer at Ubisoft the Xbox 720 ‘similar to PS4’ .

Yannis Mallat has stated that Microsoft’s next-generation console will be  ‘aligned with what Sony announced’, which means that the console will have similar features. He also told Eurogamer: It’s going to be connected. It’s going to be social. It’s going to be immersive. It’s going to be interactive.”

Rumors have been floating around for a while that Kinect will be a mandatory part of the system’s hardware and capabilities. Xbox 720 will be featuring a new controller and might even have a TV Tuner that would be sold based on a subscription model. Hopefully the Xbox will be revealed on April 26th according to previous rumors.

The PS4 is a system that mainly focuses on social experiences, instant-play model and will be released sometime Holiday 2013. Right now Sony has most of the next-generation hype under their belt and Microsoft needs to reveal their system as soon as possible.

Source: NowGamer.

The architecture will be x64 just like the one in the PS4, and it is designed to make development easier on the system which should be a good thing since the PS4 is designed with the same thing in mind.

The screenshot posted on the website is a bit hazy but here are the important parts. They also explain the Move engines which can perform common game tasks like compression and decompression while moving data around the system.

There is a low power state too which allows the system to consume less electricity when needed. They also mention something about an always on, always connected design, where an Internet connection is a must.

A Kinect sensor will be shipped with each system and will be required to start it up, although, that’s not confirmed yet. It does say it will be required for the system to operate. There will be a harddisk using which you can install lot of games and playback from the Blu Ray drive won’t be allowed. You can play while the game is installing though.

The rest can be read here. Tell us what you think in the comments section below.

We’ll let his tweets tell the whole story.

Police raided me.

— Dan (@superDaE) February 19, 2013

@supermtw I have no phone, nothing.

— Dan (@superDaE) February 19, 2013

I find it hilarious how the warrant only really mentions “Microsoft”, “eBay”, “Paypal”.

— Dan (@superDaE) February 19, 2013

@benpeace91 Because its a laughing matter to have an FBI agent and 7-8 POLICE in your house.

— Dan (@superDaE) February 19, 2013

SuperDAE, for those who remember, leaked more than 100 pages of information to Kotaku concerning the next Xbox, codenamed Durango. He was also quite aware of having violated an NDA, which is a pretty big boo-boo in today’s corporate world.

As of now, there aren’t enough details to go by – not even any pictures of warrants or anything due to the guy not even having his phone – but the major charge could be for trying to sell the developer kit for Durango on eBay.

Even though it was “mostly for publicity” and “no one thought the eBay auctions would ever sell, and they never did”, it’s still pretty much a crime when you open up an auction. Let’s see how this plays out in the days to come.

Source: GameChup

In this analysis we take a deep look in to the rumored specifications of both the consoles and decide what it will eventually mean for game developers and most importantly, for the gamers themselves.

Let us first take a look at the rumored specs of Orbis and Durango.

CPU:

Both, the Orbis and Durango are rumored to run on an 8 core CPU at 1.6 Ghz. They will be grouped in to two clusters. In majority of the cases processor speed is all that matters. In extremely rare cases, the game’s performance will be dependent on the on-board cache. The Orbis is rumored to be shipping with a shared 512MB L2 cache and on the other hand the Durango will have 4MB L2 cache. Now on paper, Orbis seems to have the upper hand, but according to us cache memory does not matter since data is mostly processed by the CPU on the fly.

Floating Point Operations Per Second:

For this you need to understand the meaning behind FLOPS. Floating Point Operations Per Second basically means:  “a method of encoding real numbers within the limits of finite precision available on computers.” Or in another words, the ease with which computers can calculate a large range of numbers quickly.  So basically  the more FLOPS your computer can perform, the more quickly it can process data.

Orbis is capable of doing 1.843 TeraFLOPS in the GPU department whereas the Durango can do 1.23. So all your game related operations like pixel drawing and other complex calculations will be faster on the Orbis. But since we are dealing with Tflops, people using both the Durango and Orbis will see next to no difference.

GPU and RAM:

The GPU of the Orbis is based on AMD’s “R10XX” (Southern Islands) architecture and has a DirectX 11.1 feature set. Most games will still be made on OpenGL, but the feature set is good to have which suggests that the Liverpool GPU is an enhanced version of the architecture. It also contains 18 Compute Units. The main clock runs at 800mhz and it is capable of 1.843 Tflops.

The Durango GPU, meanwhile, is said to be a slower than the Orbis with a total output of 1.23 Tflops. This isn’t a bad thing however, since we don’t have proper documentation for it. The GPU’s main memory runs at 800mhz, just like the one in the Orbis, and features 12 shader cores providing a total of 768 threads.

Orbis’ RAM is said to be GDDR5, which is a RAM with a higher bandwidth speed, and also quite expensive. It’s a miracle Sony have gone with such an exotic configuration as they feel they didn’t do enough justice to the PS3, where many developers complained about the less amount of RAM. The system has given 500MB to the OS, which leaves us with a decent amount of memory, which can last an entire generation without causing bottlenecks.

The Durango is said to have 8GB DDR3 RAM, which you can normally find in desktop PCs, however, the thing with Durango is that it also has a 32MB eSRAM to complement it. The eSRAM provides very high bandwidth and also takes a lot of space on the die, but it sort of nullifies the slower DDR3 memory the system has.

However, considering the Orbis has a non-split memory structure and a RAM that will not need a lot of optimization from developers, we could see games running better on the system until developers can learn how to take advantage of the Durango RAM structure properly.

We can say that both the systems have an advantage and can result in great games if they are developed with each system’s strengths in mind.

Applications:

Microsoft are clearly going to provide a more application based product with the Durango. Out of the 8GB they are allocating 1.5 GB to the OS. So one can expect more social applications on the Durango during it’s life time, something which we have already seen on the Xbox 360. Expect a lot of Kinect 2 support too.

Sony on the other hand will be allocating 0.5 GB to the OS, which should run a decent number of applications. I am sure Gaikai will be one of the applications that will be shipped along with the PS4.

What It Means For The Game Developers And Gamers:

On paper, the Orbis clearly has a better hardware with a better graphic card and a powerful RAM. But will developers use them to the fullest? That remains to be seen. Judging by the current generation and the advent of multiplatform games, very few developers will be using the full resources of the Orbis.

With development costs going high and next gen consoles following a PC like development module, expect the current trend to continue on the Orbis with better first party and multiplatform games that will perform similar to the Durango.

One thing’s for sure, Orbis unlike the PlayStation 3 should not be getting any flak from the developers regarding it’s architecture.

Both the Orbis and Durango will have something unique to offer. The Durango will be offering a totally new set of social media features, coupled with Kinect functionality. Whereas, Sony will pushing cloud based gaming with Gaikai.

Conclusion:

Sony are indeed putting their best foot forward. But does a powerful hardware mean better games?

Games is where it all matters. Right now there are more questions that answers. Hopefully we will get them answered  in the coming days and weeks.

Stay tuned for more news and updates.

The report states that the console will have eight-core CPU, 8GB RAM of the DDR 3 variety, and also 32 MB ESRAM, which is supposed to be like eDRAM of the Xbox 360 but allows the slower DDR 3 memory to function appropriately with a transfer rate of 170 GB/s.

They have also revealed that the console will have eight cores running at 1.6 GHZ each and these are Jaguar cores from AMD.

There are also some Move Engines which is supposed to be a secret sauce that is supposed to give the Durango an edge with graphics. This may or may not be completely fake, but the diagram does suggest that it should be unique.

They haven’t reported anything new, however, these are something that confirm that the specs are indeed real.

CPU:

– x64 Architecture

– 8 CPU cores running at 1.6 gigahertz (GHz)

– each CPU thread has its own 32 KB L1 instruction cache and 32 KB L1 data cache

– each module of four CPU cores has a 2 MB L2 cache resulting in a total of 4 MB of L2 cache

– each core has one fully independent hardware thread with no shared execution resources

– each hardware thread can issue two instructions per clock

GPU:

– custom D3D11.1 class 800-MHz graphics processor

– 12 shader cores providing a total of 768 threads

– each thread can perform one scalar multiplication and addition operation (MADD) per clock cycle

– at peak performance, the GPU can effectively issue 1.2 trillion floating-point operations per second

High-fidelity Natural User Interface (NUI) sensor is always present

Storage and Memory:

– 8 gigabyte (GB) of RAM DDR3 (68 GB/s)

– 32 MB of fast embedded SRAM (ESRAM) (102 GB/s)

– from the GPU’s perspective the bandwidths of system memory and ESRAM are parallel providing combined peak bandwidth of 170 GB/sec.

– Hard drive is always present

– 50 GB 6x Blu-ray Disc drive

Networking:

– Gigabit Ethernet

– Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct

Hardware Accelerators:

– Move engines

– Image, video, and audio codecs

– Kinect multichannel echo cancellation (MEC) hardware

– Cryptography engines for encryption and decryption, and hashing

Yes, you notice the Xbox 720 in the title right? Because we think that is exactly the reason why Microsoft has ramped up the security around their Redmond Campus which hosts the Xbox team. Durango, as the alpha kit is called, has been passed on to specific developers signifying that their next-gen console could launch as early as next year.

This report comes via Geekwire which has learnt that Microsoft has notified their employees that they will be implementing physical security measures and not allowing a lot of people where Xbox research happens.

“The changes will affect Microsoft Studios A, B, C, and D, on the west side of state Route 520, starting early next month with Studio A and rolling out to the other buildings by the end of the month,” Geekwire reports.