Known during development as Xenon, Xbox 2, Xbox Next or NextBox, the Xbox 360 was conceived in early 2003.
Xbox Live Silver is free of charge and allows users to create a user profile, join on message boards, access Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade and Marketplace and talk to other members.
Xbox Live Gold has the same features as Silver, plus online game playing capabilities.
Xbox Live Arcade is an online service operated by Microsoft that is used to distribute arcade video games to Xbox and Xbox 360 owners. In addition to classic arcade games, the service offers some new original games as well as games from other consoles.
Microsoft XNA is a set of tools and technologies that includes XNA Studio, which provides versions of key production tools such as asset management, defect tracking, project automation and work lists.
Only six games were initially offered in Japan, and eagerly anticipated titles like Dead or Alive 4 were not released until several weeks after launch.
E3 2006 was the first large-scale show after the console's launch and there, the first trailer for Halo 3, the third game in the flagship Xbox series of shooters, was premiered. Fable 2, a sequel to the Xbox's best-selling RPG, was also shown, along with Alan Wake, Mass Effect and Too Human. Bill Gates spoke of plans to integrate several Microsoft services into one entity with Live Anywhere.
Xenos contains 48 unified shader units, which are capable of both vertex and pixel shading operations. This is in contrast to older graphics processor designs which utilize separate specialized units for these tasks.
The console features 512 MB of 700 megahertz GDDR3 RAM on a 128-bit bus.
