Benchmarking

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The Xbox is a sixth-generation video game console manufactured by Microsoft.  It was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console market, and competed with Sony's PlayStation2, Sega'sDreamcast, and Nintendo's GameCube. The integrated Xbox Live service allowed players to compete online.

The Xbox first edition was initially developed by a small Microsoft team that included gamedeveloper Seamus Blackley. Microsoft repeatedly delayed the console, which was first mentioned in late 1999 during interviews with then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. Gates stated that a gaming/multimediadevice was essential for multimedia convergence in the new times, confirmed by Microsoft with a press release. When Bill Gates unveiled the Xbox at the Game Developers Conference in 2000, audiences wereimpressed by the console's technology. At the time of Gates' announcement, Sega's Dreamcast was diminishing and Sony's PlayStation 2 was just hitting the streets in Japan.

Some of Microsoft's plansproved effective. In preparation for its launch, Microsoft acquired Bungie and used Halo: Combat Evolved as its launch title. At the time, Goldeneye 007 for Nintendo 64 had been one of the fewhit FPS games to appear on a console, some of other ones being Perfect Dark and Medal of Honor. Halo: Combat Evolved proved a good application to drive the Xbox's sales.  In 2002, Microsoft overtook Nintendo tocapture the second place slot in consoles sold in North America.

The Xbox was the first video game console to feature a built-in hard disk drive, used primarily for storing game saves and contentdownloaded from Xbox Live. This eliminated the need for separate memory cards (although some older consoles, such as the TurboGrafx-CD, Sega CD and Sega Saturn had featured built-in battery backupmemory prior to 2001). An Xbox user could rip music from standard audio CDs to the hard drive, and these songs were used for the custom soundtracks in some games

The Xbox is based on commodity PC...