Revolution Specs Sneak Out?

March 30th, 2006, 19:56 Posted By: wraggster

It's always been Nintendo's contention that it won't be taking on either Xbox 360 or PS3 in terms of sheer head-to-head horsepower, and latest reports from the US would seem to back this up, with a bunch of Revolution developers apparently revealing the tech specs of Nintendo's forthcoming console to IGN.
Speaking under conditions of anonymity, Nintendo devs have revealed the following tech info on the GameCube's successor (see below), and quite revealing reading they make too, indicating that Nintendo is indeed going its own third way.

We've reprinted some of the key specs below for you to mull over, but it seems Revolution can be thought of as GameCube squared or possibly, ahem, cubed at a push. According to the report, some of its features - especially in the GPU department - aren't that much of an advance over the original Xbox as we reported way back here.

However, perhaps direct comparisons aren't quite so fair as an ATI boss John Swinimer recently opined , and Nintendo will be able to really push its dedicated Revolution graphical hardware to the limit. Let's face it, not too many people were complaining over Resident Evil 4's graphics and Twilight Princess doesn't exactly look shabby, so it may just be up to devs to maximise what they've been given.
That's not to say Nintendo hasn't also got some intriguing technical ideas to make the most out of the Rev's horsepower too, but if these specs are true, then the console is certain to be the lower powered, lower spec console aimed at the mass market which we've long predicted.

Chew over the specs and let us know what you think in the comments field below.

Revolution runs on an extension of the Gekko and Flipper architectures that powered GameCube.

IBM's "Broadway" CPU is clocked at 729MHz. GameCube's Gekko CPU ran at 485MHz. In comparison, the original Xbox's CPU clocked at 733MHz.

Revolution's ATI-provided "Hollywood" GPU clocks in at 243MHz. By comparison, GameCube's GPU ran at 162MHz, while the original Xbox's GPU was clocked at 233MHz.

"The 'Hollywood' is a large-scale integrated chip that includes the GPU, DSP, I/O bridge and 3MBs of texture memory," a studio source told IGN.

Revolution will operate using 24MBs of "main" 1T-SRAM. It will additionally boast 64MBs of "external" 1T-SRAM. That brings the total number of system RAM up to 88MBs, not including the 3MB texture buffer on the GPU.

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