Nintendo provided details of the GameCube, formerly code-named Dolphin, on Thursday (Aug. 24) prior to the opening of the Space World 2000 trade show in Makuhari, Japan. The box will hit the Japanese market next July and the U.S. market in October 2001.

Nintendo called GameCube the world's highest performance game console and said it will not be bogged down by various functions that turn the unit into a home information terminal. The company argued that very high peak performance of a gaming console is almost useless to game developers. Rather, performance kept at a consistent level will make it easier for game developers to create new game titles. GameCube is apparently being positioned as the antithesis of its strongest competitor, Sony's Playstation 2.

GameCube's networking capabilities were not described at the briefing, though the hardware supports several interfaces. Nintendo intends to offer a 56-kbit/second, V.90 modem adapter for the unit, as well as a broadband adapter, which will be supplied by Conexant Inc.

GameCube employs 24 Mbytes of 1T-SRAM as main memory and its graphics processor uses embedded memory because there is less delay in that memory structure. The system uses the Gekko MPU, IBM's customized version of the PowerPC with a 405-MHz clock frequency. The graphics chip, named Flipper, is produced in a 0.18-micron process and runs at 202.5 MHz. These chips are connected with an external bus that supports 1.6 Gbytes/second bandwidth and a main memory bandwidth of 3.2 Gbytes/s.

This configuration achieves floating-point performance of 13.0 Gflops, or about twice the Playstation 2's 6.1 Gflops performance. GameCube's polygon drawing rate is 6-to-12 million polygons/s, which is less than the Playstation 2. But Nintendo said GameCube can achieve that performance in an actual game environment.

Matsushita, Nintendo's GameCube development partner, developed an 8-cm optical ROM disk for game title distribution. The disk has a 1.5-Gbyte capacity and features a proprietary copy protection system developed by Matsushita. The disk resembles but is not compatible with a DVD-ROM disk. Nintendo will also provide a 500-kbyte proprietary Digicard, and the cube will also support Secure Digital flash cards through a Digicard-shaped adaptor.