7th Generation - Xbox 360

The Xbox 360 is a video game console developed by Microsoft. The development of this console began in February 2003, the same month the former president of Sega, Peter Moore, joined Microsoft. It was first released for sale on November 2005, in the United States and Canada, and then later on in Europe and Japan, and in just one year it was already launched in 36 countries.

The console has a 3.2 GHz PowerPC Tri-Core Xenon CPU, 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM at the speed of 700 MHz, and a 500 MHz ATI Xenos graphics chip. The console made use of a maximum of 512MB hard disk, and also included detachable hard drives of 20 up to 250 GB. It had a USB storage device of 1GB up to 32GB and a cloud storage of 512MB, which required a Gold Membership. As for sound it supports 48khz 16-bit audio, 256 audio channels, and makes use of Analog stereo, Dolby Digital 5.1 and Stereo LPCM.

One of the most known problem with the hardware of the Xbox 360 was overheating which was usually represented by the Red Ring of Death, which is the name given to the power button of the console that flashes red when there is some sort of hardware failure.

Figure 1 - Xbox 360's Red Ring of Death

There are several accessories which ae available for the console, such as wireless controllers, headsets and webcam for chatting, dance mats and various sizes of memory units and hard drives.

Microsoft has released several updates since the Xbox’s release. These updates add new features to the console, such as cloud storage to save games, new accessories, and voice search.

Although the Xbox 360 was not the best-selling console of the seventh generation of gaming, it sold around 84 million units as of June 2014, which is much better than its predecessor, the Xbox. This console was especially important since it strengthened Microsoft’s force in the console market.

Figure 2 - Xbox 360 game console

Games that can be played on this console include Grand Theft Auto V, Assassin’s Creed, Minecraft and Destiny. 

Bibliography:

Wikipedia.org, (2015). Xbox 360. [online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360 [Accessed 23 May 2015]

Gaming.wikia.com, (2015). Xbox 360. [online] Available at: http://gaming.wikia.com/wiki/Xbox_360 [Accessed 23 May 2015]