The Tokyo game show and the build up leading to the “official” Xbox announcements have now reached fever pitch. Since we first reported on Microsoft's “sachet” full of NVIDIA and Intel flavor way back in Private Eye #4, Microsoft's new-age console system with a great logo and a strange name gets a little more substance today. Why? Because NVIDIA has let a little more of the cat out of the bag. So instead of driving up the 101 (traffic is bad you know), we've been on a conference call with NVIDIA this week. Plus, we've pinched a few of our sources and read a few announcements now and so here's our little take on some of the technology involved.

65 million transistors. 1 billion operations per second (though the xbox site claims 1.2 trillion), 140 Gflops and Bill's Harvard class ring. Well not that last one. But the rest is there (and we have the NVIDIA PowerPoint slide to "prove" it!)

NVIDIA aside, the Xbox will contain an Intel 733MHz CPU with Streaming SIMD Extensions (that's as of today's spec), 64MB of unified memory architecture DDR RAM, a 5x DVD drive with movie playback, an 8GB Hard Drive, an 8 MB memory card and 10/100 MBps Ethernet. It is "Broadband enabled" and has an optional 56K modem (software modem is standard).

It will utilize DirectX API game development tools (who saw that one coming?), have four game controller ports, an expansion port and a proprietary A/V connector (so don't try plugging in your Mr. Microphone Delux Edition).