Posted By: wraggster
Ars Technica reports that someone has dug up the details on the Broadway chip used in the Wii.
Looking at the details, the site reports that the Broadway chip is really just an over-clocked Gekko chip, used in the GameCube, that runs cooler and with less power.
A poster at the Ace's Hardware message board has dug up a new IBM datasheet for the 750CL, which is a new derivative of the IBM 750 (a.k.a. the G3). Based on the information revealed in the datasheet, the 750CL is basically just a 90nm die shrink of the Gekko hardware that's intended to run at up to 900MHz. IBM almost certainly would not go to the trouble of launching an updated version of Gekko on a new process, unless what many have said all along is in fact true: Broadway is a faster, lower-power version of the GameCube's Gekko hardware.
This confirms what we've all suspected, the Wii is really the GameCube 1.5... but that's only looking at the specs. What Nintendo is really selling with the Wii is a new way to play games, not a new way for developers to show us the same games we've been playing for years. So when you open that box on Nov. 19, remember it's really just about the controllers.