512 MB Xbox 360 Arcade Spotted in the Wild

It appears that the Xbox 360 Arcade consoles that are being shipped around the world at the moment are different in at least one respect from those that were shipped just a few months ago. A group of modders keeping a close look at the hardware under the hood of the videogame console are saying that the new version of the platform is sporting 512 MB of internal memory, instead of the 256 MB, which Microsoft had been packing in.

This comes as the software giant announced its plans to add quite a new number of features to the Xbox dashboard, including integration with the social service Facebook, the micro blogging platform Twitter, and the music site Last.fm.

It might just be that the desired integration, which is set to make the Xbox 360 a more attractive device to gamers, is taking up more memory than currently offered, which means that the 512 MB should be the new standard for the Arcade version of the Microsoft home console. The addition was originally spotted on a console created for the Japanese market on April 9, 2009.

Another possibility is that the Redmond-based company is quietly upgrading its devices in order to make sure that they are able to run in tandem with Project Natal, when it is released sometime in 2010. Those consoles bearing a hard drive probably need little upgrade when it comes to space but the software needed probably requires more than 256 MB of memory to run on.

Interestingly, such an upgrade probably costs Microsoft quite a bit, just as the Xbox division is having problems with maintaining profitability. The Xbox 360 saw a price cut in last November, designed to make it more competitive when compared with the Nintendo Wii, which has already put a strain on the profit taken from each sale.