Revolution Coming Mid-2006
According to the system's memory supplier, anyway.
by Matt Casamassina

May 10, 2005 - Memory maker MoSys Inc. today announced its first quarter 2005 earnings. In a live conference call with investors and media the company's CEO and chief financial officer Mark Voll stated that MoSys would once again be supplying an embedded 1T-SRAM solution for Nintendo's forthcoming console, codenamed Revolution. He also revealed for the first time a general target ship date for the still top-secret next-generation platform.

"During the quarter we announced that NEC Electronics will now use our 1T-SRAM embedded memory technologies on their advanced 90nm process, and that the initial designs to be incorporated in SoCs will be used in Nintendo's next-generation game console, codenamed Revolution," said Voll. "We are excited to be a participating member of the Nintendo team once again as Nintendo will roll out its successor game console to the GameCube in mid-2006."

The news is exciting for two reasons: first, it's official word that Revolution will again use 1T-SRAM, the same memory standard that GameCube utilized with great results. 1T-SRAM provides significant advantages over traditional SRAM in density, power consumption and cost, according to maker MoSys. "Instead of six transistors utilized in a traditional SRAM storage cell, each 1T-SRAM storage cell contains only one transistor and one capacitor, thus reducing the silicon required and lowering cost. This technology has been proven with the shipment of millions of devices," MoSys writes on the subject.

MoSys did not reveal how much memory it would provide for Revolution.

Secondly, today's news suggests that Revolution will ship well after Sony's PlayStation 3, which is rumored for a first quarter 2006 debut.

IGN contacted Nintendo of America for further comment and will update the story later today if the subsidiary has anything to add.

La next-gen arrive trop vite

En effet..