Microsoft to unveil the next Xbox to the world on May 21st

next-xbox-5-21-13_780_wide

Time to mark the calendar folks, on May 21st, 2013 (that’s a Tuesday), Microsoft just confirmed that will unveil to the world the next version of Xbox, codenamed “Durango”.

So the countdown begins, in about 26 days in a half, the folks at Redmond will officially reveal the next game console that the Xbox team has been working for years. The company will be holding a special press conference at the Xbox campus, in Redmond, Washington, and everyone is invited. That’s right, Microsoft will stream live (10:00 AM PDT) the event on Xbox.com, Xbox Live and on Spike TV, that is of course, if you are located in the US or Canada.

The news comes from Major Nelson’s website, a team member of the Xbox project, and also from an invitation sent out on Wednesday by Microsoft, which said “A New Generation Revealed”, Don Mattrick and the Xbox team invite you to the Xbox campus for a special unveiling — #XboxReveal.

Xbox Reveal invite

No doubt that May 21st will be an exciting day for Microsoft and for Xbox fans as well, and we’ll finally know what the next-gen Xbox is going to bring to entertainment platform. We will finally know if indeed the console will feature the “Always On” connection. If it’ll actually be the next set-top box to have. And if the tech specs are the ones we’ve been reading about:

Possible Xbox ‘Durango’ hardware specs

According to information around the web the next Xbox will have an AMD branded CPU, X64 architecture with 8 cores running at 1.6 gigahertz (GHz). The graphic’s processor or GPU will a custom D3D11.1 class 800 megahertz with 12 shader cores providing up to 768 threads. At peak performance, the GPU can effectively produce 1.2 trillion floating-point operations per second.

It’ll also pack an ethernet port (Gigabit), Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct, a 6x Blu-ray disc drive, 8GB of RAM DDR3, 32MB of fast embedded SRAM (ESRAM), a default 500GB SATA 2 HDD, HDMI in & out and a few USB 3 ports.

Pricing

How much will the next Xbox game console cost? For this one there is not a sure answer. However, Paul Thurrott, Microsoft watcher, suggested some time ago that the console could be priced “$500, $300 with subscription”. 

Do you want to join the excitement? Confirm your attendance in the new Microsoft Facebook page dedicated to this special event. 

Source Major Nelson

About the author

Mauro Huculak is a Windows How-To Expert who started Pureinfotech in 2010 as an independent online publication. He has also been a Windows Central contributor for nearly a decade. Mauro has over 14 years of experience writing comprehensive guides and creating professional videos about Windows and software, including Android and Linux. Before becoming a technology writer, he was an IT administrator for seven years. In total, Mauro has over 20 years of combined experience in technology. Throughout his career, he achieved different professional certifications from Microsoft (MSCA), Cisco (CCNP), VMware (VCP), and CompTIA (A+ and Network+), and he has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for many years. You can follow him on X (Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn and About.me.