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Atari broke cover this week, revealing more about its planned console, dubbed Ataribox. Useful detail is thin on the ground, but we know that it's using a custom AMD processor, that it's based on the open source Linux platform and will cost a minimum of $250. So just what can we expect from the machine - and by extension, can PC technology ever dominate living room gaming?Despite the lack of a detailed spec, there are some Ataribox takeaways we can glean from the limited and somewhat contradictory info we have. For example, Venturebeat's article says that "the machine can run the kind of games that a mid-range PC can do today, but it won't run triple-A games that require high-end PC performance" - a description that doesn't help much when most triple-A 'high-end' games are built with scalability in mind and can run reasonably well on a mid-range PC with strategic settings tweaks in place.
However, despite the scant facts, the choice of AMD as a partner, the mooted price-point and the crowdfunded nature of the project can allow us to put the project into context. First of all, we shouldn't read too much into Atari's claims of a custom AMD processor. Designing an APU or even tweaking an existing one requires millions of dollars in R&D - and further financial outlay in validating custom silicon. More likely is that Atari is taking an off-the-shelf processor and using it in a different way - even liberating it from its standard socket and mounting it directly onto the motherboard could count as a 'custom' design, after all.
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