A brand new Xbox 360 which on the outside will look the same as the current model but on the inside will have a brand new engine is set to be rolled out in Australia in the last quarter of 2008. This will be followed by an all new Xbox 360 code named ‘Valhalla’, which will be released in Q3 2009.
Code named Jasper the new engine will incorporate a new 65nm Xbox 360 graphics chip, along with 65nm ‘Xenon’ CPU which will be built into the motherboard by Taiwanese Company Nanya who are also responsible for manufacturing ancillary processors for the “Jasper” engine.
The new engine has been designed to deliver better performance and eliminate the high failure rate of the current model which has recently dropped from a high of 30% 12 to 16.4 according to UK electronics warranty trading firm SquareTrade.
According to Reg Hardware SquareTrade amassed a sample of 1000 warranty claims that had already been submitted for the Xbox 360 and found that 60 per cent of the failures were due to the infamous ‘Red Ring of Death’. It found that both the Wii and the PS3 only failed about three per cent of the time, though sample sizes for both consoles were lower, in the “high hundreds”.
Company CEO Steve Abernethy told publication 1up that it expects the 16.4 per cent failure rate to increase over time because many of the recorded malfunctions arose from overheating, as prolonged use increases the likelihood that a hardware failure will take place.
Last year, Microsoft extended the console’s warranty from one year to three in order to cover problems related to the Red Ring of Death. It also said it would reimburse customers that had already paid for repairs to their consoles. The combined bill for Microsoft has, so far, been estimated at over$1 billion dollars.
According to a Taiwanese Economic News (TEN) MS is already working on Jasper’s successor, ‘Valhalla’, due to be implement in Q3 2009. They also claim that Microsoft has ramped up production of the model due for release in the last quarter of 2008.
A key element of the ‘Valhalla’ will be its ability to be used as a home management console for content with Taiwanese sources saying that users will be able to upgrade the storage sub system to a 1TB drive. It will aso run a new version of Windows Media Center.
