IGN has spoken to several Revolution developers and have gotten their hands on updated specifications for the machine, based on "either official Nintendo documentation or benchmark tests with working Revolution kits."

Insiders stress that Revolution runs on an extension of the Gekko and Flipper architectures that powered GameCube, which is why studios who worked on GCN will have no problem making the transition to the new machine, they say. IBM's "Broadway" CPU is clocked at 729MHz, according to updated Nintendo documentation. By comparison, GameCube's Gekko CPU ran at 485MHz. The original Xbox's CPU was clocked at 733MHz. Meanwhile, Xbox 360 runs three symmetrical cores at 3.2GHz.

The ATI "Hollywood" GPU runs at 243 MHz, compared to the Gamecube's 162 MHz GPU. On the memory side:

Revolution will operate using 24MBs of "main" 1T-SRAM. It will additionally boast 64MBs of "external" 1T-SRAM. That brings the total number of system RAM up to 88MBs, not including the 3MB texture buffer on the GPU. By comparison, GameCube featured 40MBs of RAM not counting the GPU's on-board 3MBs. The original Xbox included 64MBs total RAM. Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 operate on 512MBs of RAM.

The numbers definitely support the notion that the Revolution will not be in direct comparison with the 360 and the PS3. However, a very strong note of caution should be put up when comparing clockspeeds, as IGN tries to do between the Revolution and the Xbox. The two systems run on entirely different architectures, and how clockspeeds translate to actual performance within those environments can vary widely. You only need to look at the PC world, in which AMD processors at 2.2 GHz compete directly with 3.4 GHz Pentium 4s. That's not to say the Revolution is going to offer 360-level graphics just because they're different architectures, but that you can't guess much from the numbers alone.

Given these speeds and the amount of memory, it becomes much more feasible that the Revolution will debut at $199 or even $150.

Source: IGN