Rumor: DS 2, Xbox 720 chipsets chosen? @ Gaming Target

Written by John Scalzo on October 15, 2009

News: Are you ready for next next-generation systems?

Two reports from "industry sources" emerged yesterday to say Microsoft and Nintendo may have chosen the chipset designs for the next Xbox and DS, respectively.

First up, Bright Side of News has a posted a report saying that Nintendo has contracted with nVidia to use the Tegra chipset in the next DS:

According to our confidential sources, Nintendo is going to use Tegra System-on-Chip processor for the successor of DS/DSi handheld console. Unlike the current design, nVidia offered a single-chip proposal to Nintendo, a company famous for keeping the hardware platform absolutely simple.

Given the fact that current Nintendo DS hardware is based upon two ARM cores [ARM7 and ARM9 series], it looks like Next-Gen DS could be backwards compatible with the DS application library, courtesy of ARM11 core inside current Tegra SoC products. According to our sources, "all of the apps that came for old DS can run on a single ARM11 core - yet alone the CorTex A9-based next-gen Tegra, leaving graphics subsystem to do "something smarter". In any case, the hardware is now much more potent and should easily enable developers to push the envelope even further.

According to this report, the Tegra chip would allow full backwards compatibility for existing DS/DSi games and PSP-like graphics for new games.

Later in the day, Fudzilla posted a report that Microsoft is once again going with ATI for the chip design of the next Xbox:

We've learned from industry sources that AMD / ATI has already won the GPU deal for the next generation XboX console. It looks like Microsoft was happy with first Xeons GPU and it wants to continue using the same, especially since the new ATI GPU should keep the compatibility with legacy games.

Once again, backwards compatibility appears to be a priority in this chipset choice, but as it is much too early to discuss specifics, that's all we can surmise.

While it's just rumors for now, if Microsoft and Nintendo have chosen the chipset design for the Xbox 720 and DS 2 (or whatever they call them), it's possible both systems could come to market as early as 2011. But that is just crazy speculation on my part.

We'll have more soon, but likely not too soon, so enjoy your Xbox 360 and DS, they're not going anywhere for a while.