Xi3 announces next-gen Piston console beast available 19 November

Xi3’s modular Piston console goes on sale 29 November for US$1000 the company announced today with or without the cap in the picture. Pre-orders will receive the console 15 November however so lucky them. Whether this is the Steam Box we’ve all been waiting for, we’re not entirely sure.

It seems these days that everyone’s attempting to revolutionize our living rooms and Xi3’s no different. “The Piston console is just Xi3’s first step in what we believe will be a transformative technology revolution for the living room,” Xi3 founder, president, and CEO Jason A Sullivan said.

Tucked up inside the 4-inch stature there’ll be an x86-based AMD 3.2Ghz quad-core chip, 8GB of RAM and 128GB SSD (room for 1TB). The Piston also packs a massive 12 USB ports and can support up to three monitors through mini-DP, HDMI and DisplayPort that goes up to 4K resolution. Sweet!

It’s capable of supporting controllers, a mouse and keyboard and other input devices. The description on the site even says that “if a virtual reality peripheral is your thing, then go right ahead.” Although there’ll be some games pre-loaded on the Piston, we don’t know which but they’ll most likely be available through Steam.

There’s much talk on whether or not the Xi3 Piston will be running SteamOS or even if it’s fully compatible. Valve and Xi3 has a history of ties and vague pieces of announcements put together on various announcements might point to SteamOS running on the Piston but nothing’s official yet.

The talked about Steam Box was revealed at CES early this year and looks a lot like the little Piston beast machine in question.

According to the SteamOS announcement page, the SteamOS will “run on any living room machine” so that includes the Piston, doesn’t it?

As Polygon points out, if you take a look at the FAQ on the site, it reads like this:

“Xi3 has never described its Piston Console (PC) as the Steam box or a Steam Box, especially since it appears that Steam Box is a term created by journalists and not by Valve. To be clear, however, Piston console owners will be able to access and play games on/through Steam since it is a Web-based platform open to anyone with an Internet connection and a Steam account, either on a Windows — or a Linux-based system. So in this regard, Piston could be considered the first commercially available Steam Box.”

Image via Polygon