My fault, I had the impression that IBM was involved in manufacturing at least some Athlon 64 parts. Must've just received some bad info somewhere
If ms were to use AMD, AMD would be thes ones dealing with IBM about fab facilities. AMD do use IBM.
These specifcations are all speculation. Having a computer with
6 cores is likely to be very expensive. Yield rates on the CPU dies would have to be improved per wafer and the tighter 65nm is likely to increase failure rates. The reason for having no hard disk would be that it's a component which is expensive and will add more cost on top of the many cpus, graphics chips, the memory and the other stuff. Microsft still probably make a loss on all sales of the xBox because all of the oem components used.
Makes you wonder... it's not x86 based. Do they rewrite windows for PPC 976. Or do they just write DX libraries for an operating system that already runs on PPC 976? Microsoft licensed UNIX off SCO. Also, microsoft have been seen taking a delivery of a lot of Mac G5's. Who knows?