>> It looks like the first Jasper motherboards (which should have the new 65nm GPU) are now out in the wild!
Moddage posted pictures of his new Jasper 360 on our forums (
here and
here) and we also received some pictures from The Dude Z. Both are Arcade SKUs made 10-23-2008 Lot #0843X by Team FDOU.
The new power supply is now 150W (25W less than those used with Falcon boards) and the plug has of course been changed so u can't plugin this PSU into an older motherboard.
Other unannounced change ... the onboard flash chip has grown from 16MB to 256MB. Microsoft included internal memory storage, so the Arcade SKU now ships without (external) Memory Unit and the new NXE dash will install fully on the flashchip (rather than requiring a HDD or external MU). But the internal memory can also be used to store gamesave data, XBLA games, videos or whatever ... u can use it asif it was an external MU. (as the flash chip is also used for the kernel/keyvault/dash etc there seems to be about 214MB left according to
scoldingice on our forums to store your own stuff)
I'm guessing the Jasper PRO and Elite SKUs will also come with this internal memory. It's just cheaper for Microsoft to make 1 type of motherboard for all SKUs rather than making a different version for each SKU. Also seems logic in a way ... get the full NXE dash on the internal flash is much 'cleaner' than using HDD/MU for it.
The motherboard design didn't change much ... besides the bigger flash and what's probably the new 65nm GPU, we also see a new south bridge model ... the rest (videochip, CPU, heatsinks, general board layout, ...) seems pretty much similar to falcon boards.
It also appears there are RAM chips on the bottom of the board again (without thermal pads even) ...
Microsoft recently switched to RAM chips with double capacity so they could drop the 4 chips on bottom (and only place 4 on the top) ... but apparently they are back (old stock maybe?). However the type of RAM chips they use is not bound to the motherboard revision ... there are falcon boards with RAM chips only on the top and falcon boards with RAM chips on both top and bottom. Same can happen for the jasper boards.