The Xbox 360 was the first home console to be released in the seventh generation of game consoles and competes against Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii.
Its Xbox Live service allows players to compete online as well as download games and additional content.
Businessweek magazine compiled a report that estimates the total cost of components in the Xbox 360 premium bundle at US$525 at launch,[16] sans manufacturing costs, meaning that Microsoft initially lost money on every Xbox 360 system sold.
Dashboard version 2.0.4532.0 allows the Xbox 360 to output video at 1080p and installs support for Zune and the external HD DVD drive attachment.
Microsoft XNA also includes other components such as the XNA Framework and XNA Build. Anyone can develop a game using XNA Game Studio Express, an IDE for homebrew developers, which was initially released in beta form on August 30, 2006.
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.
The Xbox 360 takes a new approach to hardware compared to its predecessor. The CPU, named Xenon-CPU (or XCPU) at Microsoft and "Waternoose" at IBM, is a custom triple-core PowerPC-based design by IBM.
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.
