Gadgets and gizmos

Have you ever fancied working for Microsoft on a cutting edge new games system? Have a little peep at the professional person’s networking site LinkedIn and you will see that Microsoft have put on a few job vacancies such as “VLSI performance architect” and “hardware verification engineer”.

The Xbox first appeared in 2001 and was a huge success before being replaced by the Xbox 360 in 2005. The life span of the Xbox 360 was said by Microsoft to run up to 2015 but we have been hearing whispers for a while about a new version being in the pipeline, and these LinkedIn announcements confirm that something is indeed brewing.

It appears that these positions on LinkedIn are to work on nothing other than the keenly awaited new Xbox model which is going to update the Xbox 360. The verification engineer ad states that this is a chance to work on a “dynamic engineering team” and perform a “key role” in developing and verifying the “Xbox and future platforms”. It then goes on to say that the person they want to hire will be responsible for the “verification and qualification of the Xbox console as the component, motherboard and system levels”. There is also an ad for a graphics hardware architect for the Xbox console architecture team.

Current industry rumours have it that the new Xbox will be with us shortly, but these job vacancies seem to point to the fact that Microsoft is still at a fairly early stage in the process and that you can expect to wait a fair bit longer before you can get your hands on the new Xbox, unless you apply for one of the jobs that is.

It will be interesting to see when we see the first leaks of images and videos of the new system reaching us. Will it be a huge step forward in gaming or a modest update to a winning formula?

Via: Metro