Power Mac G5: Microsoft's XBox 2 Development Platform


Remember the former Microsoft employee who snapped some pics of some Power Mac G5 boxes in the delivery bay? It looks like they were for the XBox developers. Maybe.

IGN cites a San Jose Mercury story that the forthcoming XBox 2 will have three G5 64-bit processors and a high-end ATI Radeon card. The game prototypes for XBox are reportedly being developed on Power Mac G5s.

XBox 2s will also reportedly have 256 or 512MB RAM and, possibly, a hard drive. It all depends on the feature set and spec of Sony's Playstation 3.

Analysis: 64-bit processors? Well obviously you'd develop it on a G5. The question is, if this is true, whether game developers will bring more games (not XBox games, but PC games more generally) to the Mac - specifically the G5. At least porting may be a lot easier if MS is developing tools, although whether the tools would ever legitimately see the outside of Redmond is another question altogether.