Nintendo 64

Yokoi Gunpei and Masayuki Uemura, the two old hands, were already waiting off to the side.

"President, the hardware has been finalized." Genyo Takeda handed over the report and pointed to the motherboard beneath the prototype shell as he explained. "A custom MIPS R4300i processor fabricated by NEC, clocked at 93.75 megahertz, using a 0.35-micron process. Most crucially, this is a true 64-bit RISC architecture, with computing speed reaching 93 MIPS."

He paused, his tone carrying undisguised pride. "Sony's PlayStation and Sega's Jupiter are still rolling around in the 32-bit mud. We've crossed an entire era in one leap."

Yamauchi Hiroshi flipped through the report.

He had no intuitive grasp of specific megahertz figures, but he understood the simplest marketing logic: "64-bit is one generation higher than 32-bit."

"How does the graphics coprocessor provided by SGI perform?" Yamauchi Hiroshi asked, getting straight to the core issue.

"A 62.5-megahertz RCP coprocessor." Masayuki Uemura picked up the thread, pointing to the parameter charts in the report. "It integrates a signal processor and a graphics processor internally. Even with all effects enabled—Z-buffering, anti-aliasing, texture mapping, trilinear filtering, and perspective correction—it can still maintain a rendering capability of 150,000 polygons per second. Perspective correction in particular: Sony's machine often suffers distortion and warping when handling 3D textures, while our machine can ensure the image remains smooth and accurate from any viewing angle."

"As for memory, we're using Rambus RDRAM, with a capacity of 4 megabytes," Genyo Takeda added. "The licensing fees for this solution aren't cheap, but it can provide a terrifying bandwidth of 562.5 megabytes per second. To handle possible large-scale games in the future, we've also reserved an expansion slot on top of the machine, allowing players to purchase an expansion pack themselves and upgrade the memory to 8 megabytes."

Yamauchi Hiroshi