Xbox was first released on November 15, 2001 in North America, February 22, 2002 in Japan, and on March 14, 2002 in Europe.
The Xbox 360 is the first console to have a near-simultaneous launch across the three major regions, and the first to provide wireless controller support at launch.
The Xbox 360 sold out completely at release and by the end of September 2006 had sold 6 million worldwide.
Microsoft is predicting that with the Xbox 360, a greater market share, yearly revenue through their Xbox Live service, and falling hardware costs will eventually make system sales profitable.
Xbox Live Gold has the same features as Silver, plus online game playing capabilities.
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.
John Carmack stated at QuakeCon 2005 that the Xbox 360 has "the best development environment I've seen on a console".
Updated emulation profiles can be obtained through Xbox Live, by burning a CD with profiles downloaded from Xbox.com, or by ordering an update disc from Microsoft.
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.
