New Xbox One has eight times the graphics performance and New Kinect can measure your pulse by scanning your face

Wired has the details on the new Xbox One. This was previously what was expected to be called the Xbox 720.

Microsoft touts the Xbox One as delivering 8 times the graphic performance of the 360. If you were to go by raw transistor count, that performance jump would be closer to tenfold: the Xbox One boasts 5 billion to the 360’s 500 million. It has 8GB RAM and an 8-core CPU.

A new 500-GB hard drive was designed in-house, likewise a custom-built Blu-ray–capable optical drive. A single 40-nanometer chip contains both the CPU and GPU rather than the two dedicated 90-nm chips needed in the 360. In fact, a custom SOC (system on a chip) module made by AMD contains the CPU/GPU chip, the memory, the controller logic, the DRAM, and the audio processors, and connects directly to the heat sink via a phase-change interface material.

Xbox One gives game developers the ability to access Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform. That leads to a few obvious and immediate applications: All your downloaded and installed games and achievements are synced to the cloud and can be accessed and played without interruption on any Xbox One you sign in to; stable, dedicated servers for every multiplayer game rather than the notoriously fragile practice of hosting matches on one participant’s console; even multiplayer matches that can grow to 64, even 128 participants, rather than the usual limit of 16 or 32.

Retooled Kinect

* 60% larger field of view
* Kinect camera can also capture video at 60 frames per second for two-way services like Skype—but more impressive still are the Kinect’s tracking capabilities. It’s now so sensitive that it can measure your pulse by monitoring pigmentation change in your face
* the new Kinect sends out a modulated beam of infrared light, then measures the time it takes for each photon to return. It’s called time-of-flight technology, and it’s essentially like turning each pixel of the custom-designed CMOS sensor into a radar gun, which allows for unprecedented responsiveness—even in a completely dark room
* Kinect will be used for that most fundamental of tasks: turning the whole thing on. Xbox One utilizes multiple power states; it can thus ramp up as needed and consume different amounts of juice depending on use, whether games or movies. And it also possesses a low-power standby mode, allowing Xbox Live and game updates to be pushed to the Xbox One overnight — or whenever the box knows your usage is lowest

Xbox One for TV

It has HDMI pass-through, in which the cable box, satellite box, or similar device (e.g., the aforementioned cablecard-equipped TiVo ) connects directly to the Xbox One, which then passes the mediated signal to the television via an HDMI-out port.

Because of that direct pipe from your TV provider to the Xbox One, you can watch TV with varying degrees of Xbox overlay.

Future

At this point, fewer than 2 million Surface tablets have been sold. Windows Phone has a 3.2 percent share of the smartphone market. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, has sold 77 million units and has been the bestselling game console in the US for 21 straight months.

Azure lets the cloud becomes that tissue, then the Xbox One could be the hub of the integrated experience Microsoft sorely needs.

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