New Xbox Magnus: Full specs revealed with a dizzying amount of RAM

An earlier leak by YouTuber Moore's Law is Dead shed some light on the Magnus SoC slated to power the next Xbox. It boasted of some lofty specs, such as 68 CUs (Compute Units) and an unspecified amount of memory on a 192-bit bus. Tom's newest video now sheds light on everything Xbox Magnus has to offer.

Its GPU will be manufactured on TSMC's N3P or N3C node, while its SoC will be on TSMC N3P. On the CPU side, it will come with an 11-core CPU with three Zen 6 cores and eight Zen 6c cores. Tom states that the figure is tentative and that some of them could be disabled. Lastly, Xbox Magnus also comes with an NPU for on-device AI tasks.

The next Xbox console could come with a massive RAM upgrade

Now, moving on to the spiciest bit. The above-mentioned 192-bit bus could be accompanied by up to 48 GB of GDDR7 VRAM. That figure is borderline overkill for a gaming console, but with the next Magnus-powered Xbox slated for a 2027 release, it might be necessary to stay relevant in an eight-year release cycle. Nevertheless, a realistic figure, such as 24 GB, seems more plausible.

All this computing power will require some serious silicon real estate. With a rumoured die size of 408 mm², the Xbox Magnus could be one of the largest chips on a mainstream console. However, that is still much smaller than Nvidia's top-spec offerings, such as the RTX 5090's GB202 die, which has an area of 761 mm². Lastly, the Magnus might guzzle up to 350 Watts of power under full load, far higher than the Xbox Series X (200 Watts).

If previous rumours about the Xbox essentially doubling up as a beefed-up gaming PC are accurate, Microsoft will need all the power it can get to run a somewhat full Windows install. Third-party launchers such as Steam and Battle.net will further drive up the need for extra compute.