Intel and Microsoft endorse HD-DVD

Intel and Microsoft have chosen to endorse Toshiba´s HD-DVD format over Sony´s Blu-Ray standard. CNet writes:

Intel and Microsoft are combining their industry power in an attempt to make the HD DVD format the victor in a battle over a standard to succeed DVD.

Typical DVDs today can hold 4.7GB of information, but two dueling camps are trying to establish a larger-capacity format that will allow for the recording of high-definition television and the backing up of more data. HD DVD, supported by a Toshiba-led consortium, is up against Blu-ray Disc, which is backed by Sony and others, including the two biggest personal-computer manufacturers, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

Intel and Microsoft believe weighing in on the HD DVD side will be enough to tip the balance. "We have a high expectation of having a single format, and that format is HD DVD," said Intel spokesman Bill Kircos.

There are several reasons the two companies went with HD DVD, said Richard Doherty, Microsoft's program manager for media entertainment convergence. Among them: HD DVD requires that movies be copied to a consumer's hard drive, making it easier for people to send movies around home networks; the format supports regular DVD recordings on the flip side of the disc, letting people sell hybrid discs to consumers who have DVD players today but fear their discs will be obsolete; and the format offers more capacity.

Obviously, this spells big trouble for Sony and their PS3. The PS3 will feature a Blu-Ray drive. Sony has already rallied some support in the movie industry. But without Microsoft and Intel, what good is that? Perhaps Microsoft supports HD-DVD also to strike a blow at the PS3. Either way, this could be the decisive point in HD-DVD´s favour. And if so, the PS3 will almost definitely be delayed. Sony will have to seriously reconsider including Blu-Ray in their console, because the format may be dead by the time the console is meant to come out.

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.”

Is the cat out of the bag?

Just when we thought the cat was out the bag, the bag starts to meow. At least there is a suggestion of some details about the Revolution controller that have not yet been revealed. Look at the following picture taken from this IGN gallery. Kudos to Robert Wydra, who drew my attention to this in the last post´s comments.

Look closely at the reflection of the controller at the bottom and you will find that the reflection differs from the actual controller. Instead of the ´a´ button, there is a ´Y´ button next to what appears to be a square hole (probably housing an LED). You can just about guess that there is an ´X´ button above. Let us look at this in detail. I have copied and pasted the reflection, mirrored and flipped it accordingly and intensified the contrast. Compare the reflection with the actual controller.


As I have always made clear, I don´t believe in any N-game. There never was one and there isn´t one starting now. This may not even be Nintendo´s doing. It could be IGN knowing more than I had guessed, after all. The same image on Nintendo´s site is significantly smaller and it´s very hard to make out that exact detail. I have treated that part of the picture the same way I did IGN´s (without flipping and mirroring though) and the result is somewhat inconclusive. There does seem to be a dark spot right where that LED hole is in the larger IGN picture, but I can´t be sure. See for yourself:

I have formally requested the larger images from Nintendo (why they don´t simply post the large ones on their own site is beyond me anyway) and will post news as soon as I receive them. In the meantime, I am undecided. If the fake reflection is Nintendo´s doing I would regard this as very weird. If it was done by IGN it would be another hidden message that they know something we don´t, just like they did with the console design back in May. In that case, I may have been too hasty to dismiss IGN in my last post. It would be nothing unusual, though. If Nintendo issued the picture with the fake reflection, however, it may indeed mean that there could be another cat in that bag. A mistake during the production of the picture seems highly unlikely.

EDIT Nintendo of Europe just called me back saying they themselves did not have the high-res version yet. They expect to get them towards the end of the week. I´ll keep you posted.

EDIT Thank you for all your comments. You have correctly pointed out that there are two controller layouts that were still decided on at the time. Also, that dark blob next to the ´Y´ is actually the letter ´a´, not an LED housing. You can see this quite clearly in the demo video that was part of Iwata´s speech. I just hadn´t seen the entire clip by the time I posted this. In my opinion, it seems more likely now that the wrong reflection is indeed a mistake. But, given that, it would still be a weird coincidence.