Nintendo's Revolution to emerge in mid-2006, says key supplier

A solid indication of the timeline for the launch of Nintendo's next home console has emerged from memory firm MoSys Inc, which has revealed that it will supply memory for the system, with "mid-2006" touted as the launch date.

MoSys previously provided the 1T-SRAM memory technology used by NEC for the GameCube's memory, and speaking in a live conference call following the announcement of the firm's Q1 earnings, CEO and CFO Mark Voll said that it would again be fulfilling this role for Revolution.

"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," he said.

The most interesting part came next, however, when Voll commented that: "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."

This is the first solid evidence that the Revolution platform is still on track for a mid-2006 launch. The console is expected to debut at a pre-E3 conference next Tuesday, but it's still not known just how much will be on display - with sources close to Nintendo suggesting that only a pre-recorded video of "next-gen footage" may be shown.

MoSys didn't reveal how much RAM would be going into each Revolution console - but in an unrelated story also doing the rounds about Revolution today, Chinese website Unika.com claims to have seen an actual specification for the hardware.

According to the site, the console will boast four 2.5Ghz IBM G5 Custom cores, with 128KB of level 1 cache and a 512KB shared level 2 cache, while the graphics will be powered by a dual core ATI RN520 chipset, with 16MB of on-board eDRAM for the frame buffer.

While both of those specifications seem eminently possible - not least because IBM and ATI are confirmed as Nintendo's hardware partners for the console - we've been unable to find any confirmation or denial of the figures, simply because no developers outside of Nintendo's tightly sewn up inner circle actually have Revolution details, let alone devkits, as yet.