From insider sources at Microsoft have confirmed that the company is building an Xbox Surface (a 7-inch gaming tablet that will go head-to-head with other dedicated gaming consoles), such as the PlayStation Vita, and the Wii U tablet controller.
According to The Verge, the Xbox Surface tablet is still in the “initial hardware planning” stages, and that it will probably include a “custom ARM processor” and “high-bandwidth RAM.” Furthermore, the insider sources say that documents detailing the Xbox Surface that were leaked in June are accurate.
From these documents, we able know that the Xbox Surface has a
1; 1280×720 display,
2; SD card slot,
3; WiFi/Bluetooth connectivity.
On the software side of things, the 7-inch Xbox Surface will run a “custom Windows kernel,” almost certainly based on Windows 8 -much in the same way that Windows Phone 8 shares the same core features as Windows 8, but isn’t Windows 8. You’ll be able to do tablety-type stuff on the Xbox Surface, such as messaging and browsing, but it will not feature a full, extensible operating system (such as iOS, Android, or Windows 8).
Here’s where things start to get messy, though. The sources say that the ARM SoC could also be swapped out for an as-yet-unannounced Intel SoC (probably the upcoming 22nm Bay Trail, successor to Clover Trail) — and as such, the Xbox Surface is being designed with platform agnosticism in mind. Generally, choosing a hardware platform is one of the first things that you would do, because it dictates the feature set of the device. How can Microsoft get game developers on board, if they don’t know what hardware to target?
