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To: gnuman who wrote (61183)	11/14/2000 11:20:39 AM
From: Don Green	Respond to of 93625

Nintendo Unveils Next Generation Video Game Machine at Last November 13, 2000 (SANTA CLARA, Calif.) -- Nintendo Co., Ltd. has unveiled its next-generation video game machine, "Gamecube," a year before its launch. Though Nintendo brought out the current machine, the "NINTENDO 64," in 1996, it turned out to have been a failed attempt without much support from game title developers. So far, the market of home video game machines has been completely taken over by Sony Corp. with its PlayStation family ( See graph at the bottom ). Now, Nintendo aims to reestablish its supremacy in the market by introducing the Gamecube. The development baseline of the Gamecube was set to enhance throughput of the machine instead of maximum logical performance. With higher throughput, producers of game titles are able to cut costs for performance tuning, which will lead to gaining support and acceptance from game producers suffering from ever increasing development expenses. This is the key concept of Nintendo's strategy. In order to upgrade the effective performance, the company exercised some ingenuity. First, it adopted high-speed memory to allow fast random access. The microprocessor to be mounted was designed to integrate a secondary cache of 256KB on a level with high-performance microprocessors. The design also features an ambitiously applied wired logic to a circuit for geometry drawing in order to help game producers get rid of the tough work of complicated program creation. Giving Weight to Random Access Nintendo has experience in this business, which has caused the company to turn to high-speed memory. Previously, when the company developed the NINTENDO 64 model, it adopted as its main memory Rambus DRAM, one of the faster types of memory back then, with a maximum data transfer rate of 500MB/sec. But, it failed to meet expectations of showing high performance when titles of game software were created taking advantage of the three-dimensional graphics on the NINTENDO 64. The company found that latency on making random access was more important than the maximum data transfer rate when drawing a picture on a scene where real-time performance is definitely needed. This is why a U.S. venture company, MoSys Inc., developer of the "1T-SRAM" memory, was chosen as the provider of high-speed memory for the Gamecube. The memory was integrated into the graphics LSI called "Flipper," and also mounted as main memory. nikkeibp.asiabiztech.com