Xbox 360 to Get Cool New GPU This Fall

Reports have surfaced from Taiwan that chip makers are set to produce enhanced Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for Xbox 360. The new processors are designed to keep Microsoft’s gaming machine cool during those all night Halo 3 fests and hopefully end the dreaded red circle of death once and for all.

We saw new Falcon flavored Xbox 360s hit the market last year. These were Xbox 360 units that had upgraded the old 90-nm chip to leaner 65 nm CPUs. The enhanced efficiency of the CPUs weren’t designed to make the Xbox 360 any faster, just run cooler (here’s how you can identify an Xbox 360 Falcon CPU edition).

Microsoft and its valuable Xbox brand has taken a significant hit over the red circle of death, that’s the warning signal that your Xbox 360 has overheated and will need to be serviced by Microsoft. At its peak, estimates had put the number failures at almost 30 percent of units sold (although Microsoft still maintains failure rates were well below 10 percent.)

The CPU is a large part of the gaming machine's total processing - but what about the other chip that crunches the polygons, pixels and textures for those amazing graphics? That job is held by the Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) which has always been a 90 nm chip. Even the Falcon based Xbox 360 units contain the same old 90 nm GPU.

The good news for heat-weary Xbox 360 fans is that a new, cooler 65 nm GPU is coming to match the CPU. Code named Jasper it’s rumored to replace the old 90 nm in units on store shelves as early as this fall.

We’ll report the sku numbers of the new Xboxes when available. Retailers understandably don’t want to draw unnecessary attention to hardware enhancements inside new units when they ship. Otherwise nobody would buy the older stock. So, when it comes to identifying which ones have new processors you’re left digging through the web for rumors of manufacture dates, bar codes and skus.

You got to hand it to Microsoft, the company has taken fast action to fix its investment in the gaming community. Yeah, the next-gen console was probably rushed to beat PS3. A little more QA is what the Xbox 360 needed from the start and hopefully Microsoft is compelled to do know better next time.

The next big step will be to see if and when a Blu-ray version ships...