Offcial Revolution Specs?

IGN reveals "100% legitimate" technical specification for the Revolution.

Gathering news from a "variety of trusted development sources", IGN's Matt Casamassina has revleaed what he claims are the final technical specification for the Nintendo Revolution.

The main CPU of the unit - IBM's "Broadway" chip - has reportedly been clocked at 729MHz, a speed which falls just below that of the original Xbox, which ran at 733MHz, and far below that of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, both of which run at 3.2GHz.

The Revolution's GPU, a chip provided by ATI and codenamed "Hollywood", will be running at 243MHz. To put that in perspective, the Xbox's GPU runs at 233MHz. The Xbox 360's GPU clocks in at 500 MHz, and the PlayStation 3's GPU is reported to run at 550 MHz.

Casamassina's source is quoted as saying that "the 'Hollywood' is a large-scale integrated chip that includes the GPU, DSP, I/O bridge and 3MBs of texture memory", though the chip will, apparently, not contain the specialised shader technology suggested by a number of sources.

The unit will contain a total of 88MBs of RAM, made up of 24MBs of "main" 1T-SRAM and an additional 64MBs of "external" 1T-SRAM - though, apparently, the access speed for the two RAM caches are the same. There is also an extra 3MB RAM on the GPU, which is set aside as a texture buffer.

Keep in mind, though, that none of this has been yet confirmed by Nintendo, and that the company had previously indicated that final development kits for the Revolution would not be released until June, so the numbers be not be as final as IGN claims.

More to the point, Nintendo has been talking for months about how they don't intend to compete with Sony and Microsoft in terms of power. Processing power is one thing, but a cheaper console with an innovative controller is something else entirely.

src: IGN

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