Microsoft’s GDC keynote speaker, John Schappert has announced that the Xbox 360 has reached another milestone, over 18 million units sold worldwide.
“I think that we’ve sold 18 million, the last time I’ve checked. 18 million hardware units worldwide,” said Schappert. He would not however, project sales for the rest of 2008.
The speaker also went on to say that the company would probably not even bother with an external Blu-ray drive for the console simply because the HD DVD add-on sold poorly.
“We have no plans to announce anything like that right now. But I’d also urge you to look at the attach rate for the HD-DVD drive,” he noted. “It was a 3 percent attach rate…you also have to take into account how did the other accessory do when you look at the future.”
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Shuttle has announced the launch of its latest small form factor PC, the XPC G5 6801M Vista , which includes a dual format HD drive by LG allowing playback of bothHD DVD and Blu-ray films.
The PC uses a Radeon HD 3450 with full 1080p Resolution which can output in either DVI or HDMI through a bundled adapter.
Somewhat surprisingly, the Shuttle will run on an AMD CPU, with basic setups starting at a 2.2GHz Athlon 64 X2 all the way up to its latest 3GHz equivalent. “The system also comes with at least a dual DVB-T tuner for digital over-the-air broadcasts, a 320GB hard drive, and 2GB of memory.” At its cheapest, with the Blu-ray/HD DVD drive, the 6801M Vista costs $1,721 USD and is available now.
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According to the Xbox 360 DVD Drive Database, the new ‘Jasper’ Xbox 360s have begun shipping as of August in the UK and in the US.
The ‘Jasper’ hardware revision is the shrinking of the GPU from a 90nm chip to a 65nm chip which the company hopes will keep the system cooler and significantly reduce the now infamous ‘red ring of death’, the sign that your 360 needs to be replaced.
Overall, Microsoft has spent $1 billion USD in replacing 360s that have failed (mainly from overheating) which has dipped into profits the software maker is making on the console.
The database says the Arcade model is shipping with the Jasper revisions in the UK, the US and other countries around Europe. A new update marked this week shows the Elite model shipping to the US with the Jasper revisions.
