The Xbox 360 is the successor to Microsoft's Xbox video game console, developed in cooperation with IBM, ATI, Samsung and SiS.
The end of OurColony came on May 12, 2005, with the release of a video where J Allard of Microsoft showed off the Xbox 360 console.
On November 6, 2006, Microsoft announced Xbox Live Video, an exclusive video store accessible through the console. Launched on November 22, 2006, the first anniversary of the Xbox 360 launch, the service allows users to download high-definition and standard-definition television shows and movies through Xbox Live onto an Xbox 360 console for viewing.
John Carmack stated at QuakeCon 2005 that the Xbox 360 has "the best development environment I've seen on a console".
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.
Backward compatibility is achieved through software emulation of the original Xbox.
While the first Xbox's graphics processing unit was produced by NVIDIA, the Xbox 360 uses a chip designed by ATI called Xenos.
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.
