Rumour mill churns around 'Xbox 720'

The next generation of Xbox will have six times the processing power of the Xbox 360 and will ship to retailers in late October or early November of 2013, according to a number of sources close to the project.

IGN has confirmed initial reports from tech blogs Fudzilla and SemiAccurate stating that mass production of the system’s GPU will begin by the end of 2012.

The report says the new system will not be based on AMD’s 7000 series Southern Islands GPU but rather the 6000 series, which was introduced last year.

This means the new console will be similar to the Radeon HD 6670, which offers support for DirectX11, multidisplay output, 3D and 1080p HD output.

What does all this tech jargon mean for the everyday gamer? The Xbox 720’s raw graphics processing power is expected to be six times that of the Xbox 360 console, and yield 20% greater performance than Nintendo’s forthcoming console, the Wii U.

These developments are all well and good, but is actually a need for a new console, or are the current models keeping up just fine? Comment below and let us know.