"Microsoft worked with Big Blue to devise the system-on-a-chip (SoC), which has 372 million transistors and runs much cooler than IBM and AMD's first Xbox chip. That was responsibly for many consoles overheating and getting the infamous Red Ring of Death."

Don't be an idiot. The chips were not responsible for overheating.

INADEQUATE FSCKING COOLING was responsible for overheating of the chips.

Also, it's not particularly pretty English - don't you think?

I really enjoy watching the game consoles imporve over the manufacturing process. Saving of electricity and improving the life span of the hardware is a super plus. Makes me wonder why they don't just improve hardware for the next couple of Generations. More power and in a stable upgrade path, similar leap or hopefully more as GC is to Wii. We will be happy with the backward compat at least. With the PC market slowing by the developers jumping on the console bandwagon and the DRM damaging the actual big names on the PC... what will happen to the progression of hardware development?

What will the next console be like? What kind of SoC will it be running and when. I wonder if the 360/ps3 is getting long in the tooth yet.

It's an impressive SoC all in all - a tri-core, six-thread 3.2GHz PowerPC (albeit not very powerful per clock, compare to Atom clock for clock rather than Core i7!), and a quite-powerful 240 SP ATI GPU (R600), and other northbridge functions.

However, is it really a SoC when all the I/O is in another chip still? Then again, Ontario and Llano won't be SoCs by the same measure.

It's also a cost advantage over the PS3, because it's unlikely NVIDIA will ever allow RSX to be integrated on the same die as Cell, so they'll remain separate chips.

I wonder how fast this SoC, and the PS3's current Cell, could be made to run given the newer processes and power consumption headroom?