ATI won't be making R500 (Xenos) chips for Microsoft's Xbox 360. ATI's job was to design those chips and to give the designs back to Microsoft to get them produced.
 
ATI would have had to help Microsoft with tape outs and with design tweaking, as those guys at ATI designed the R500 Xbox 360 GPU. But developers are now getting the "Real" hardware still based on G5 MACs but this time with real R500 graphic cards inside. This means that R500 chip is taped out and that it is working but we don’t know whether this is the final chip that Microsoft plans to ship at later date.  
 
We heard few times that Microsoft will get both R500 and CPUs from IBM’s Fishkill factory in New York. We cannot confirm this at this date but it sounds very likely to us.  

This is not an official Microsoft picture, it's a render made by Nydendarin on the TeamXbox forums. It gives you an idea how the Xbox360 would look like with a metallic black color.
At this moment it's unknown if the Xbox 360 will be available in other colors besides the original silver look, but it's likely Microsoft will release Special Editions of the console later on with different colors like they did with the current generation Xbox.
 

Havok, the video game industry's leading supplier of crossplatform middleware solutions for game developers, announced today that it is developing an innovative new software technology for all of its middleware products that will help game developers leverage the built-in power and scalability of multi-core and multi-threaded next generation game platforms from manufacturers like AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.  
 
“The face of gaming will change significantly in the next two years, as the computational power available to PC and video game players takes another huge step forward,” said Jeff Yates, VP of Product Management for Havok. “Next generation game systems will offer built-in scalability in the form of multi-core and multi-processor hardware that will be standard in consumer game systems shipping in the next 12 months. Havok’s HydraCore™ software technology is designed to help game developers tap into the true power of these systems, by distributing real-time computation of physics and character animations flexibly and evenly across multiple processors.”  
 
HydraCore is an adaptive middleware technology that will allow game developers to flexibly assign and remove threads from the computationally-heavy tasks that next-generation games will require – from computing physics simulations for dynamic and destructible worlds, to helping game characters respond more intelligently to each other and their environments. HydraCore accelerates these elements of game-play by dividing up the work load and dispatching it to any number of central or secondary processing units such as the AMD Athlon™ 64 processor family. HydraCore ensures Havok-powered games can harvest the native scalability of the next wave of consumer PC game platforms – without requiring specialized add-on hardware.  
 
“Developers are only now beginning to scratch the surface of the computing power available from our cutting edge AMD Athlon 64 FX processors,” said, Bob Brewer, corporate vicepresident, AMD Desktop Business Division, Microprocessor Business Unit, Microprocessor Solutions Sector (MSS) Business. “AMD is committed to the PC game industry and supports the groundbreaking strides made by Havok in bringing multi-threaded capabilities to the next generation of PC games.”  
 
HydraCore will support all next-generation game systems that offer multi-core and multithreaded hardware capabilities, including PCs and next-generation video game platforms from Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and Microsoft. HydraCore is also designed to gracefully support non-multi-core or single-threaded game environments to ensure the widest possible deployment options to today’s largest game developers.

heu... PGR3 est une exclu ok , mais Bizarre developpe pas exclusivement sur 360 ? Si ?

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microsoft annonce avoir acquis les droits exclusifs de développement et de publication des jeux en ligne mettant en scène les "super héros" de la société Marvel Enterprises, tels que Spiderman et X-men.
 
L'accord concerne les titres de jeux en réseau développés pour la nouvelle Xbox 360 de Microsoft et conçus par les studios du géant du logiciel. Le premier titre devrait sortir en 2008.
 
Les jeux en réseau permettent à des joueurs situés en divers endroits de jouer ensemble via l'internet. Ce genre de compétition est notamment prisé en Asie pour les joueurs sur PC.
 
La Xbox 360 devrait sortir à l'automne. En novembre dernier, Microsoft avait lancé la Xbox Live, une console permettant le jeu en réseau et en ligne via un service payant.
 
Marvel Enterprises, dont le siège est à New York, gère un catalogue de plus de 5.000 personnages. Elle réalise son chiffre d'affaires en vendant des personnages sous licence pour des vêtements, pour des films, des jeux, etc. Elle vend aussi des jouets de son cru.
 
Marvel a déjà des accords dans les jeux vidéo avec Activision, Electronic Arts, Vivendi Universal Games, THQ et Majesco Entertainment. Mais l'accord avec Microsoft est son premier contrat MMO (massively multimedia online).