For the record, no, we don't own any game consoles. While we have relatives who actually own all three of the Holy Triumvirate (PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube), the last dedicated video game system any of us owned was a secondhand Sega Game Gear from sometime back in the late Cretaceous Period. So our continued interest in the upcoming Xbox 2 seems unnatural, because even if we were going to drop a couple hundred clams on a game system we'd never have time to play, it's pretty unlikely we'd pick the one system that would require forking the dough straight over to Microsoft, who we generally figure has plenty enough filthy lucre without getting any more from us, thank you very much.

Still, this continued saga of Microsoft allegedly ditching the Xbox's current x86 roots for some sort of PowerPC-derived processor in the console's sequel is gripping stuff, if you happen to be wired in that specific compulsive-Mac-geek sort of way. And here's the latest development in the story: faithful viewer David Poves notes that The Register dug up some Chinese forum post on a site called GZeasy which alleges to have an actual tech schematic of the Xbox 2.

We aren't technically qualified to judge whether said schematic is even remotely viable as a legit example of Microsoft design, although the total lack of crayon marks makes us a tad suspicious. Still, let's assume for a moment that it's the Real Deal™, because the most interesting bit is at the top of the diagram where there are clearly three "3.5+ GHz CPU" cores listed. While it doesn't say anything about whether they're x86 or PowerPC, The Reg seems to think that since "the CPU is linked to main memory via a traditional North Bridge," at the very least it can't be an Athlon 64. And since the CPUs are known to be 64-bit and made by IBM, this is quite possibly more evidence (however dodgy) that the Xbox 2 will indeed be powered by a trio of G5s or something derived from them. After all, we don't suppose there are exactly a ton of mass-produced, non-G5, non-Athlon 64 chip architectures floating around out there.

Basically, we're going to be obsessing about this until Microsoft comes clean on just what sort of chips are going to be in that freakin' thing, because so far all the reports claiming one thing or another are "questionable." And aside from the whole "wanting to see PowerPC beat x86 out of an important platform" thing, we're also anxious to see if analyst Rob Enderle can break the streak of a lifetime and be actually be correct for once when predicting that the Xbox 2 will be AMD-based. We all have a vested interest in seeing how that particular situation resolves, because, you know, if Rob ever is right with one of his predictions, we're all going to perish in the ensuing spontaneous total collapse of the universe. So get interested, already.