Revolution rumors for serious geeks

Since it's still months until the expected spring 2006 release of the Nintendo Revolution, there is little hard news about the next-generation console.

True, the Japanese video game giant shocked the world earlier this month by unveiling the revolutionary game controller that players will hold in one hand instead of the standard two.

Other than that, little has been known about the Revolution while competitors Sony and Microsoft long ago spilled their guts about the guts of their next-gen consoles, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, respectively.

Now though, technology site Ars Technica has posted an article with rumors of the Revolution's specs. The site admits that it's nothing more than rumors, but attributes them to someone who had previously pegged the Xbox 360's specs almost spot on prior to any official Microsoft announcement.

In any case, Ars Technica says that the rumored specs are as follows: "A single dual-threaded IBM "custom" PowerPC 2.5GHz CPU, with 256 KB L1 cache and 1MB of L2 cache (L3 cache is rumored)."

The site also said the Revolution will come with a Physical processing chip (PPU) with 32MB of dedicated RAM, and the CPU will "be saddled up next to 512MB of system RAM."

Unless you're a serious game console geek, these numbers probably won't mean much to you, and it's not clear how they stack up against the 360 or the PlayStation 3. But if you do get off on specs like this, then Ars Technica has more: The ATI GPU solution "is rumored to consist of a RN520 600MHz core, backed with 256MB of RAM and '32 parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines.'"

The real question is: Will it play Super Mario Bros. in such a way as to justify the several hundred dollars the Revolution will cost. We'll all likely have to wait until next year for the answer that one, specs or no specs.