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A recent patent filing suggests that Microsoft's next console is based on the idea that it can be scaled up - or down - over time, leading to speculation that the current notion of a console lifecycle could be replaced with rolling hardware upgrades. Application 20120159090 was submitted in December 2010 at the US Patents and Trademark Office and was published last month, subsequently unearthed by "Sonic" from the Beyond3D Forum. It describes Microsoft's attempts to patent "versions of a multimedia computer system architecture... which satisfy quality of service (QoS) guarantees for multimedia applications such as game applications while allowing platform resources, hardware resources in particular, to scale up or down over time".
Patent applications are filed all the time, but what makes this one interesting and relevant is that the system being described - and revealed in attached diagrams (go here for more easily viewable pics) - shares the same fundamental ideas as the "Yukon" system covered briefly in the now infamous Xbox 720 leak that first emerged at the beginning of May. Those documents have been confirmed by sources as genuine and date back to August 2010, and the patent application gives us further insight into Microsoft's thinking during the beginnings of the R&D work that culminated in the development of the current Project Durango.
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