Lately there seems to be an increased number of reports that Microsoft is going to showcase its next-generation Xbox console this year. There's even a countdown for this year's E3 over at MajorNelson's, indicating the possibility of a big announcement from MS. Naturally, there are even more stories out there and one of them is that this new Xbox is supposedly codenamed Durango.

The new Xbox technology reportedly features an 8-core 1.6GHz CPU, 8GB of DDR3 RAM and a Blu-ray drive.

Of course, there's more, so check it out (via VGleaks):

CPU:
- x64 Architecture
- 8 CPU cores running at 1.6 gigahertz (GHz)
- each CPU thread has its own 32 KB L1 instruction cache and 32 KB L1 data cache
- each module of four CPU cores has a 2 MB L2 cache resulting in a total of 4 MB of L2 cache
- each core has one fully independent hardware thread with no shared execution resources - each hardware thread can issue two instructions per clock

GPU:
- custom D3D11.1 class 800-MHz graphics processor
- 12 shader cores providing a total of 768 threads
- each thread can perform one scalar multiplication and addition operation (MADD) per clock cycle
- at peak performance, the GPU can effectively issue 1.2 trillion floating-point operations per second High-fidelity Natural User Interface (NUI) sensor is always present

Storage and Memory:
- 8 gigabyte (GB) of RAM DDR3 (68 GB/s)
- 32 MB of fast embedded SRAM (ESRAM) (102 GB/s)
- from the GPU's perspective the bandwidths of system memory and ESRAM are parallel providing combined peak bandwidth of 170 GB/sec.
- Hard drive is always present
- 50 GB 6x Blu-ray Disc drive

Networking:
- Gigabit Ethernet
- Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct

Hardware Accelerators:
- Move engines
- Image, video, and audio codecs
- Kinect multichannel echo cancellation (MEC) hardware
- Cryptography engines for encryption and decryption, and hashing The most recent Xbox 720 release date reports suggest Microsoft is targeting a holiday 2013 release for its next-gen box.