The more I think about it the more it becomes likely to me that Strix Halo might be an upcoming xbox SoC. It would be beneficial for MS to pull a PS3 style move but they could only do that after having bought the most popular 3rd party games. The PS3s problem was that PS2 relied on a lot of 3rd party games for its audience. PS3 got poor 3rd party support for popular games with the CPU shift to more cores and they didn't have any first party as popular as GTA, CoD etc to show any benefit to that shift at the start of the gen. If you own the biggest 3rd party games then this is no longer a problem. You can capitalise on it. You can have games you've developed run like crap on 8 core PCs and PS systems. Games like CoD, Minecraft, Fallout, Doom, Elder Scrolls, etc can become heavily CPU bound and run worse on everything except xbox and maybe the latest AMD CPUs. Wouldn't land them in legal trouble either because they can just point to an 8 core CPU in other machines and talk about technical feasibility.