Xbox 360 Release date announced

The word is out. The Xbox 360 is to be released in the states on November 22nd, December 2nd in Europe and the UK, and December 10th in Japan. I’ve got my pre-order ready to go, although it’s interesting to note that the specs have changed a little from initial projections.

With Ridge Racer 6, Frame City, Dead Or Alive 4, Ghost Recon, Tetris, Enchant Arm and Everyparty in Japan’s line-up, I’m looking forward to some seriously nice Xbox Live action come December. Of course, I’m really waiting for Final Fantasy XI.

Just in case you missed the specs, here they are in full:

Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU

* Three symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
* Two hardware threads per core; six hardware threads total
* VMX-128 vector unit per core; three total
* 128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread
* 1 MB L2 cache

CPU Game Math Performance

* 9.6 billion dot product operations per second

Custom ATI Graphics Processor

* 10 MB of embedded DRAM
* 48-way parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
* Unified shader architecture

Polygon Performance

* 500 million triangles per second

Pixel Fill Rate

* 16 gigasamples per second fill rate using 4x MSAA

Shader Performance

* 48 billion shader operations per second

Memory

* 512 MB of 700 MHz GDDR3 RAM
* Unified memory architecture

Memory Bandwidth

* 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
* 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
* 21.6 GB/s front-side bus

Overall System Floating-Point Performance

* 1 teraflop

Storage

* Detachable and upgradeable 20GB hard drive
* 12x dual-layer DVD-ROM
* Memory Unit support starting at 64 MB

I/O

* Support for up to four wireless game controllers
* Three USB 2.0 ports
* Two memory unit slots

Optimized for Online

* Instant, out-of-the-box access to Xbox Live features with broadband service, including Xbox Live Marketplace for downloadable content, gamer profile for digital identity, and voice chat to talk to friends while playing games, watching movies, or listening to music
* Built-in Ethernet port
* Wi-Fi ready: 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g
* Video camera ready

Digital Media Support

* Support for DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, CD-DA, CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 CD, JPEG Photo CD
* Ability to stream media from portable music devices, digital cameras and Windows XP-based PCs
* Ability to rip music to the Xbox 360 hard drive
* Custom playlists in every game
* Built-in Media Center Extender for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
* Interactive, full-screen 3-D visualizers

High-Definition Game Support

* All games supported at 16:9, 720p, or 1080i, with anti-aliasing
* Standard-definition and high-definition video output supported

Audio

* Multi-channel surround sound output
* Supports 48KHz 16-bit audio
* 320 independent decompression channels
* 32-bit audio processing
* Over 256 audio channels

Physical Specs

* Height: 83 mm
* Width: 309 mm
* Depth: 258 mm
* Weight: 7.7 lbs.

System Orientation

* Stands vertically or horizontally

Customizable Face Plates

* Interchangeable to personalize the console