the lines mean more power!
There are strong rumours flying around in the Land of the Rising Sun that Nintendo has considerably increased the spec of the GameCube, making it an altogether gruntier beast.
We first noticed that the CPU speed had been changed when pawing through the press information distributed by Nintendo at E3. It read that the CPU would now run at 485 MHz, a change from the 405 MHz first published by Nintendo. We assumed it was a typo. We checked on the official GameCube site that also reported a CPU running at 485 MHz. We then, wrongly it seems, assumed that the information in the press release was wrong and that it had been taken from incorrect info on the site.
A report on the massively reliable Japanese games site Magic Box claims to have a full update direct from ATI confirming a whole new bunch of performance stats. As yet the new figures are unconfirmed but this makes interesting reading.
As stated, the GameCube core processor Gekko will now run at 485 MHz, not 405 as originally published. The MPU “Flipper”, the machine’s secondary processor, will now run at 162 MHz and not 202 MHz with the DSP altered to 81 MHz.
All of this means that the bus speed will increase from 162 MHz to 202.5 MHz and the embedded 1-T RAM which is custom manufactured by NEC, will have a capacity of 3MB at 10.4 GB per second. The outer 16 MB SRAM will now run at 81 MHz at 2.6 GB per second.
If you didn’t understand this, don’t worry. It essentially means that the GameCube will have a little more technical clout than originally thought. Nintendo would not comment today, which seems altogether strange. It looks like the company tried to just sneak out the new information and hope that no-one noticed.
We would assume that this kind of announcement would be hailed from the rooftops over at Nintendo towers. The console came in for some early fire when the original spec was revealed for being under-powered. Nintendo just told the world to have faith, which we did, but it is now unclear on which machine the games shown at E3 were running on.
There is a lot of tidying up to do around this news and it needs an announcement from Nintendo. As soon as that happens, we will let you know.
We first noticed that the CPU speed had been changed when pawing through the press information distributed by Nintendo at E3. It read that the CPU would now run at 485 MHz, a change from the 405 MHz first published by Nintendo. We assumed it was a typo. We checked on the official GameCube site that also reported a CPU running at 485 MHz. We then, wrongly it seems, assumed that the information in the press release was wrong and that it had been taken from incorrect info on the site.
A report on the massively reliable Japanese games site Magic Box claims to have a full update direct from ATI confirming a whole new bunch of performance stats. As yet the new figures are unconfirmed but this makes interesting reading.
As stated, the GameCube core processor Gekko will now run at 485 MHz, not 405 as originally published. The MPU “Flipper”, the machine’s secondary processor, will now run at 162 MHz and not 202 MHz with the DSP altered to 81 MHz.
All of this means that the bus speed will increase from 162 MHz to 202.5 MHz and the embedded 1-T RAM which is custom manufactured by NEC, will have a capacity of 3MB at 10.4 GB per second. The outer 16 MB SRAM will now run at 81 MHz at 2.6 GB per second.
If you didn’t understand this, don’t worry. It essentially means that the GameCube will have a little more technical clout than originally thought. Nintendo would not comment today, which seems altogether strange. It looks like the company tried to just sneak out the new information and hope that no-one noticed.
We would assume that this kind of announcement would be hailed from the rooftops over at Nintendo towers. The console came in for some early fire when the original spec was revealed for being under-powered. Nintendo just told the world to have faith, which we did, but it is now unclear on which machine the games shown at E3 were running on.
There is a lot of tidying up to do around this news and it needs an announcement from Nintendo. As soon as that happens, we will let you know.
Companies:
Nintendo
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