Revolution specs leaked?

The good people at Engadget have picked up on a story that has been going ´round the forums for a couple of days now. Beforehand I disregarded it as ´another one of those specs rumours´, but now I believe we actually got ourselves some substantiated stuff here. Here´s the rundown:

* a multithreaded PowerPC 2.5 GHz with 256 KB L1 cache and 1 MB of L2 cache

* a Physical Processing Chip (PPU) with 32MB of dedicated RAM, 512MB of system RAM

* a custom ATI “RN520” 600MHz CPU with 256MB of RAM

* the device will support external resolutions up to 2048 x 1268

* HD support is still as yet undecided

* 7.1 surround

Sounds good? So does the story of where these specs come from:

So apparently this dude who works at Factor 5 (they’ve done some Star Wars games) who goes by Han Solo has some supposedly leaked specs of the Revolution, which if they’re real might give the box a bit more of a fighting chance than we’d originally anticipated. Keep in mind this is the same person, we understand, who leaked some nearly dead on specs of the Xbox 360 before it was announced.

As I said before, I have ignored all spec leaks to this day. But if sites like Engadget and Joystiq are picking up on it and are willing to consider it as a possibility... well, so will I.

EDIT Here´s the original post by Han Solo as posted on this G4TV forum thread.

Nintendo has modified the System 1 specs. They have deleted the System 2 specs as it is obviously expensive and really powerful.

System 1 specs can be viewed on the first page of this thread, posted by White Wolf. Nintendo now has to choose between the System 1, that’s on the front page, or these Modified Specs.

System 1 Modified
CPU:
1 IBM Custom PowerPC 2.5 GHz with 256 KB L1 cache and 1 MB of L2 cache (an L3 cache is rumored). It’s Dual Threaded

13 billion dot product operations per second

Revolution GPU

ATI Custom based RN520 core. The "N" stands for Nintendo, and is because the ArtX team is with them, that is why it’s an "N".

GPU core at 600 MHz. Will support up to 2048x1268 resolution, HD support is still being decided. Will have 256 MB’s of 1T-SRAM (the RAM is much better due to some tweaking, compared to GC’s RAM. The latency and Cells are much more efficient and faster. Around 1.2 ns is the latency, on average).

32 parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines.

Polygon Performance: 500 million triangles per second theoretical, average in game would be around <100 Million/sec>

Shader Performance: ~50 billion shader operations per second

Revolution memory

512 MB of 700 MHz 1T-SRAM

Other bits and pieces
Revolution will support a PPU chip (Physical Processing Chip). There will be 32 MB’s of its own RAM, which will link to the CPU and GPU and the Controller.

There will also be a separate sound card that will support only DD 5.1 – DTS 7.1, rumors has it will have 16 MB’s, like the Cube DSP

So there’s the modified version. I think this would be on par with Xbox360, though PS3 could have an edge in the CPU area. In the GPU area the Revolution beats PS3, and technically would match Xbox 360.

And here´s Julian Eggebrecht´s reply, head of Factor 5, courtesy of Gizmodo:

“Han Solo is a scoundrel, we all know that, but in this case he isn´t a very clever scoundrel. That so-called employee of ours posting on message boards under the Han Solo name certainly isn´t employed at Factor 5 or working in any way for us. He isn´t speaking for the company and he better change his story as to where he has his information from, or we will be forced to take legal action against him.”