Welcome back to Multicore. This is Instruction Set for June 19th, coming at you one day early because I’ll be travelling tomorrow.
After last week’s announcement of the Xbox-branded ROG Ally handhelds, the other shoe dropped this week.
Xbox president Sarah Bond, in a brief video posted to YouTube:
At Xbox, our vision is for you to play the games you want, with the people you want, anywhere you want. That's why we're investing in our next-generation hardware lineup across console, handheld, PC, cloud and accessories.
I am thrilled to share we've established a strategic multi-year partnership with AMD to co-engineer silicon across a portfolio of devices, including our next-generation Xbox consoles, in your living room and in your hands.
Together with AMD, we are advancing the state of art in gaming silicon to deliver the next generation of graphics innovation, to unlock a deeper level of visual quality and immersive gameplay and player experiences enhanced with the power of AI. All while maintaining compatibility with your existing library of Xbox games.
This is all about building you a gaming platform that's always with you, so you can play the games you want across devices anywhere you want — delivering you an Xbox experience not locked to a single store or tied to one device. That's why we're working closely with the Windows team to ensure that Windows is the number one platform for gaming.
The next generation of Xbox is coming to life and this is just the beginning. We can't wait to show you what's next.
On one hand, this is all great news for the Xbox. New hardware is coming, the handhelds now make a lot more sense and confirmation of backwards compatibility maintains the platform’s biggest strength.
On the other, it is total capitulation to Xbox’s failure in the living room over the past decade, and I am not sure that expecting Microsoft to figure out Windows on a TV at the umpteenth attempt is necessarily sensible. A simple, powerful PC that plays my Xbox and Steam libraries without fuss sounds like a product I’d be interested in, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
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