Nintendo Revolution Chips Won't "Go" Very Fast

Nintendo's upcoming Revolution gaming platform, which is rumored to be officially named "Go," may not go as fast as had been originally hoped, at least if you believe the numbers that were dug up by ign.com. The website obtained updated documentation, showing the IBM "Broadway" CPU that powers the box will run at 729MHz. That's slightly slower than the original Xbox CPU, which ran at 733MHz. By comparison, Xbox 360 has a three-core chip running at 3.2GHz.

The graphics processing unit (GPU) on the Revolution, dubbed "Hollywood," has a clock speed of just 243MHz, compared to the original Xbox's 233MHz speed. At least that's better than the original Game Cube's GPU, which ran at 162MHz.

Those are a lot of numbers, but they may not mean much. Nintendo presidents past and present say they're more concerned about the controller than the speed of the hardware, where they think what you hold in your hands is more important to gameplay than the horsepower under the hood. And then, well, there's the quality of the games, too.