Earlier in the week some pictures were published on a Chinese forum showing off a potentially new Xbox 360 motherboard design. This comes just a week after a job posting on Microsoft’s site was looking for a motherboard designer. I’ve been hesitant to post about this story because it looks like the CPU and GPU are combined into one chip (much like some new PC processors) but the design and features of the motherboard scream “Xbox 360 Redesign”.

You’ll find two internal sata ports which suggest an internal DVD drive and potentially an internal HDD. Also there’s a dedicated optical-out port for audio (compared to it being on the AV adapter) and what seems to be an omission of memory card ports. Feel free to speculate on what this could mean for the future of the Xbox 360 in our comments.

本页主题: XBOX360新款主机蓄势待发 [A9VG Forums]

A new job posting has emerged on Microsoft’s website looking for a Motherboard Design Engineer. The position calls for someone who would help create new motherboard designs for the Xbox 360 console in an effort to reduce the production cost of the console as well as “expanding the  market for the console in derivative products". While this could just mean smaller iterations in the existing console design to cut down costs (which they’ve been doing for several years now) it still provides a little hope for us to see a slimmer Xbox 360.

This job posting comes just a few days after Steve Balmer mentioned potential new “form factors” for the Xbox 360 in a Q&A seminar, which was published on Microsoft’s site. Balmer was caught saying “You get exactly the Xboxes that we build for you. We may have more form factors in the future that are designed for various price points and options, but we think it's going to important.”

Motherboard Design Engineer – Xbox Console [Microsoft]