Microsoft dreamed up a next-gen Xbox, powered by Zen 6 and Navi 5, and 'performance beyond the capabilities of the client hardware alone'

20.09.2023 - 12:47 / pcgamer.com / Phil Spencer

From leaked court documents we now know that Microsoft dreamed up a «cloud hybrid» games console. One that would harness both the power of a local AMD Zen 6 or ARM CPU, a Navi 5 semi-custom GPU, and a cloud gaming platform to deliver «new levels of performance beyond the capabilities of the client hardware alone.»

Accidentally appended to court documents in the FTC v. Microsoft case, we know Microsoft did, at one time, envisage such a device from slides included in the leaked files (via The Verge). Also that the company intended to reach this vision of «cloud hybrid games» with its next-gen console in 2028.

One image included in the documentation is a slide titled «the journey has already started…», which outlines the exact milestones needing to be reached in order to hit that late 2028 launch window. This includes a decision on Arm64, penned in for later 2022, assumedly on whether to bother using an ARM-based processor or to stick with tried and tested x86. An ARM-based Xbox would surely be a sight to behold, but perhaps an unlikely one?

Xbox boss Phil Spencer has since played down the documents on X, as you'd expect, saying that «so much has changed» since these documents were created. Spencer also notes in an internal memo that «when we're ready, we'll share the real plans with our players.» 

Let's be realistic, anyways. We're talking about a console launch potentially half a decade away, if not more. Details can and will change, leak or no leak.

Whether this exact vision comes to pass, well, I'd say we usually end up with something a little more watered down when it comes to a shipping product anyways. Remember the Xbox One reveal? That thing was a souped up Fire Stick for at least a month after its announcement, and that all very quickly made way for a more traditional gaming console soon after, albeit a pretty 'meh' one.

Nevertheless, the leaked slides are a good glimpse at how the sausage is made. For the console's silicon, research begins a whole six years before the final stage of validation ahead of release. An initial dev kit is noted across late 2026 into early 2027. A final dev kit comes later that year before heading to the final mass assembly stage through 2028. Game production, on the other hand, begins as early as 2023.

Though there are already games that use this sort of hybrid cloud-local mix, such as Microsoft Flight Simulator, a game that introduced many systems for offloading parts of a game to a server in the cloud, including maps and real-time weather effects, and even Crackdown 3. Apps are already trending towards this sort of computing vision, too. Just take Adobe Photoshop, you can use its smartest features either accelerated locally, on your own chip, or through the cloud