What’s under the Rev’s hood?

American site IGN have revealed the upcoming Nintendo Revolution system specifications. Now keep in mind that the source of these specs are developers with near final development kits only. It is therefore possible we may (as in the case of the Gamecube and Xbox) still see an improvement to these figures closer to launch or E3 when fully finalized dev kits make their way to developers.

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IGNs sources claim that the Revolutions architecture is similar to that of the Gamecube. The CPU (codenamed Broadway and developed by IBM) is running at 729 MHz compared to GameCubes Gekko CPU which clocked in at 485 MHz. In this respect, Revolutions CPU is one and a half times as powerful as GameCubes. Clockspeed doesnt tell the full story though as we cannot be sure what optimizations IBM have included.

The Revolutions GPU (codenamed Hollywood and developed by ATI) is running at 243 Mhz in comparison to GameCubes Flipper GPU which ran at 162 Mhz. Again the increase in clockspeed is one and a half or 150%. Hollywood will again feature 3 MBs of texture cache like Flipper. Revolution will feature a total of 88 MBs of main RAM (24 MBs primary and 64 MBs secondary). In comparison, GameCube featured 24 MB of main RAM and 16 MB of A-RAM for a total of 40MB. It currently isnt confirmed whether Revolution will feature the 16 MB of A-RAM that GameCube did.

However, even if the Revolution less powerful then the Xbox360 and PS3, does it really matter? Well yes, it would be nice to have the same graphics as the Xbox360 and the PS3, but its not what Nintendo are aiming for and it just isnt going to happen. Nintendo have said they arent getting into a graphics war with Microsoft and Sony. The new experiences the Revmote will bring as well as the complete Revolution package (Revmote, Virtual Console, Wifi Connection and Backward-Compatibility) will still make the Revolution are very fun console to play and thats what it is all about.

Source: IGN