Last week, Microsoft dropped a bombshell on the gaming (also known as "loser") community by having Frodo go on MTV to explain the new Xbox 360 game console to the public. Sadly, the joke was on the viewers, because Hobbits, while quite adept at blowing smoke rings and engaging in homoerotic world-saving, apparently don't know jack about video games. It was MTV's friendly way of telling its viewers that they had been punked and that their proverbial video game "ride" was in no danger of being pimped now or in the near future.

Consequently, I've taken it upon myself to enlighten Blank of the Day's stalwart readers about the power of this new video game behemoth. Indeed, I have gone to the very heart of the central core in the middle of the hub of the lion's den that is Microsoft to bring you these top-secret hardware specifications, as well as an annotated analysis therewith:

Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU: Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each

Good god, man, do you mean to say that you've been playing games on asymmetrical cores this entire time? Fortunately, the Xbox 360 puts an end to all that, with the advent of gloriously symmetrical cores. I'm no math whiz, but I'm pretty sure that means all the angles of the cores now add up to 180. Impact: 9/10

CPU Game Math Performance: 9 billion dot product operations per second

Wasn't dot product the one where you multiply two things then add them? Look, I said I wasn't a math whiz. Kiss off. Impact: 6/10

Pixel Fill Rate: 16 gigasamples per second fill rate using 4x MSAA

Holy fuck that's a lot of gigasamples. Impact: 10/10

Overall system floating-point performance: 1 teraflop

What's a teraflop? Every Matthew McConaughey film since Dazed and Confused. Zing! Impact: 1/10

Audio: Over 256 audio channels

After Howard Stern's contract with Infinity Broadcasting expires in 2006, you will only be able to hear his program on the Xbox's exclusive talk channel. They also have bluegrass. Impact: 4/10

System Orientation: Stands vertically or horizontally

Well played, Microsoft. But can it hang upside down while slipping tongue to a nubile Kirsten Dunst? I thought not. Impact: 0/10

posted by Ilya at 1:22 AM - Permalink

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