Taipei (Taiwan) – News about refreshed Xbox 360 consoles are trickling, which is about time given the fact that the console will celebrate its third birthday later this year. The Taiwan Economic News is reporting that first wafers with 65 nm GPUs are leaving the production lines, joining the 65 nm Xenon CPU. Rumors about a Blu-ray Xbox 360 remain alive and we are hearing first information about a possible mid-cycle refresh for the console, which will include the ‘Valhalla’ SoC.

It has been almost a year since Chartered has begun taking the Xbox 360 Xenon CPU from 90 nm to 65 nm and it really was just a matter of time until other hardware would follow. According to the Taiwan Economic News, TSMC has initiated first wafer starts of the 65 nm Xenos GPU and Northbridge. Microsoft apparently has ordered 10,000 300 mm wafers from TSMC at this time.

Quite honestly, we were a bit surprised to hear that Microsoft did not decide to die-shrink both the CPU and GPU at the same time, especially because two different foundries are manufacturing the chips. However, our sources at TSMC explained that Microsoft has the same production philosophy as Nvidia: Wait for a manufacturing process to mature and then run the initial wafer order. Apparently, the transition was simulated in detail by ATI and the tapeout happened without problems, at least according to our sources close to ATI. Keep in mind that ATI is only a contracted partner for Microsoft: Both the CPU and GPU are officially Microsoft parts, and the Ballmer-Gates company is the only one in the console segment following through with such a strategy.