A report from French gaming site Xboxygen claims we'll be hearing about Microsoft's next generation home console sooner rather than later. According to the article, Microsoft will start publicly speaking about the 360's successor as soon as January's Consumer Electronics Show.
Coming from a source "very close" to the software giant, the rumor states that the announcement will be a relatively low-key one, focusing more on the system's existence and the technical muscle it'll bring to the table rather than specific game announcements or footage of software running on the box.
This new report seems to confirm prior rumors, which revealed the project's supposed internal codename, Loop. According to this new info, that's the name for the software branch of the team, while the hardware side goes by the name Infinity. Those earlier rumors had the next gen Xbox pegged as cheaper and smaller than the 360, with support for the Kinect peripheral considered a primary focus of the console.
Xboxygen's source also bandied about some specs — a hex-core CPU, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, and an AMD GPU — but there's no word of a potential release date.
CES 2012 runs from January 10 to 13 in Las Vegas, Nevada, so we should know the truth behind the rumors in just a few short months.