Despite the buzz some of you may have read about this year's Comdex, it was a tad quieter than usual. The numbers were down (some said by 25,000) and so were the budgets spent on evening parties...but as with every Comdex, there's always a cat or two dragged out of the bag. With a full set of contacts, amongst them, hardware designers, manufacturers, OEMs and developers (not to mention marketing people) to pick on, our ampullae of Lorenzini managed to dig out info on several topics of interest to you, our readers.

Here's a little Comdex update on the X-Box (Microsoft's worst kept secret), which we first covered in the last issue of the Private Eye. Bearing in mind the cost of the unit needs to be under $300, we were told that it's still a neck and neck for the choice of both CPU and graphics processor. The emphasis, as we stated last time, looks to be more on the graphics sub system as opposed to the CPU itself.

We were told that Microsoft is targeting a geometry performance level that rivals that of Sony's PlayStation2, which has (depending on who you ask and how the wind is blowing) geometry performance of 30 million to 66 million polygon transforms per second.

Microsoft should be looking at the bottom end of the CPU scale in terms of price (how else are they to keep the unit at $299?). Thus we think that the lowest possible speed 'bin' will be sought after, whether that be from Intel or AMD. Just like last time, if we had to bet on it and based on a few more conversations at Comdex, we'd predict the CPU as being an AMD K6-2/3E (Microsoft seems to be leaning more towards AMD than Intel at this time). This low-cost, .18micron solution would be what's required when coupled with a graphics subsystem capable of some 2 Gigapixels per second (yes you read that right). We've heard that Microsoft wants a performance level that's even greater than the just announced Voodoo5 6000's paper specs of 1.3 Gigapixels/second.