A lot of rumors have been playing regarding Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox console, codenamed Durango. We previously reported rumors that it will ship with a blu-ray player and will require an internet connection at all times. Now, another very interesting rumor about Xbox 720 that has surfaced is that it will ship with 16-core CPUs.

It has been reported that when Microsoft shipped development kits to developers for the new console, it included an IBM PowerPC CPU with whooping 16-core CPUs. If this is indeed true, this indicates a huge step forward for the Xbox platform since the current Xbox 360 console tools just three-core CPU.

However, this does make sense. That is because we know for near-sure that the next console from Microsoft will come with Kinect. And Kinect may use as much as four cores of the 16-core CPU just for tracking the motion of the user. Also, the graphics chip that was included in the dev kit for the new console is tantamount to Advanced Micro Devices Radeon HD 7000-series graphics card. Moreover, the developer kit also includes a blu-ray optical drive, which kind of confirms the earlier rumors that the new Xbox console will have a blu-ray player.

Another thing that we can establish from this report is that we can expect the next Xbox console to arrive sometime in 2013. This is because Microsoft shipped the dev kits in March and developers usually need a year or so to finalize launch titles for the machine.

Image courtesy Fanchille.

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