Nintendo's Mini Revolution

December 7th, 2005, 16:02 Posted By: wraggster

Half the fun of these glory days (and weeks and months) before a brand new console's launch is the rampant speculation, serving to tease, amaze and flabbergast with its wily claims of technical magnificence, painful inferiority, promises of gaming wonderment or just a big old lump to add to the mounting collection of machines under your telly.
One of the more mysterious entries in the next generation of consoles is of course Nintendo's Revolution, with the company remaining characteristically tight-lipped about everything from the machine's specs to the games themselves. However, IGN has managed to lay its hands on a bunch of leaked specifications, courtesy of seemingly reliable industry insiders regarding those elusive specifications.

After yesterday's Revolution revelations, the website has spilled a second batch of information. Brace yourselves - here comes the science bit.
Apparently, the console's Broadway CPU is an extension of the GameCube's existing Gekko CPU and is capable of delivering one and a half to twice the performance of the tiny purple beast, also featuring improved caching. Similarly, the machine's clock speed is said to be twice that of the GameCube. Furthermore, the Hollywood GPU is believed to be an extension of the existing GC GPU.

As far as RAM goes, the Revolution is said to "build on GameCube's configuration of 24MBs 1T-SRAM and 16MBs D-RAM (40MBs) by adding an additional 64MBs of 1T-SRAM", totalling up to 104MB. This apparently excludes the GPU's on-board memory claimed to be 3MBs. Sources are suggesting that this reduction in RAM compared to other next-gen machines' is indicative of Nintendo's philosophy of not competing directly with Sony and Microsoft from a techological standpoint this time around.

In terms of storage media, the Revolution's discs are said to hold 4.7GBs of data (a DVD standard) on a single layer and 8.5 GBs when dual-layered.

Although rampant technophiles might be disappointed with the apparently underpowered specs of the Revolution, there's one very big silver lining as a direct result. Most of the sources IGN questioned agreed that, given the machine's reserved technical configuration, a sub-149 USD price tag would seem likely, with many suggesting they could easily envisage the console hitting shelves for 99 USD.

Frankly, at that price - and with it's intriguing controller - we can see the thing whizzing out of stores when the Revolution comes sometime next year.

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