In yet another hint regarding its plans for the successor to the Xbox, Microsoft today announced a technology development agreement with M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers. The agreement pertains to those ever-popular "future Xbox products and services," also mentioned in Microsoft's earlier agreements with Intel, ATI, and SiS.

Those three covered CPU development, graphics hardware development, and chipset development, respectively. The M-Systems agreement covers "customized memory units," which could be a few different things depending on how Microsoft chooses to design its next game console.

"Although Microsoft is not obligated to purchase any memory units under the agreement, we believe that this agreement could represent a significant opportunity for M-Systems," said M-Systems president Dov Moran.

M-Systems is a maker of many different flash RAM products, ranging from simple storage cards like those used in mobile phones to full-fledged IDE/SCSI hard drive replacements. Thus, while the most obvious conclusion to be made from the announcement is that M-Systems is developing a proprietary memory card for Microsoft's console, it could also be developing a flash RAM replacement for the hard drive used in the current Xbox. That would dovetail neatly with reports from some sources claiming that Microsoft will not include a hard drive in its next console.

Of course, the announcement also includes a description of M-Systems' SmartDiskOnKey platform, a line of simple USB memory keys, so their contribution to the next Xbox will probably not be quite so ambitious as that.

Microsoft is widely believed to be preparing details of its next console for a presentation at the Game Developers Conference. We look forward to perhaps securing more enlightenment there.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in 1UP.