BORDER TOWN - Home of Pok-Eye the long shoreman

Everyone (who is a massive, massive nerd) is going nuts right now about the Nintendo Revolution technical specs that IGN released. As it turns out, the system is going to not be as strong as the X-Box 360 or the PS3, which is something everyone's been expecting since the thing was announced anyway.

Something disquieting about IGN's story though is a part where it says "Clearly, numbers don't mean everything, but on paper Revolution's CPU falls performance-wise somewhere well beyond GameCube and just shy of the original Xbox." The guy goes on and tries to qualifies it later, blah blah blah, but even suggesting the Revolution will be weaker than an X-Box just because it's clock-speed is lower is brutally dishonest.

For all the laymen out there who don't ever understand all of this techno babble, allow me to explain it to you as a person who actually went to college and took seven hours worth of classes on the subject. I'm not saying I'm a genius or even that smart, but I think I have a good bead on at least this point of debate.

Let's pretend that a CPU (or GPU) is like a city filled with magical ants. The ants band up together in groups of eight (and in later cases, 16 or 32) and go walking down a sort of magical path, like the Yellow Brick Road from "Wizard of Oz". Now, as they scoot and fart and prance down this path, they come to different junctions, and depending a number of factors decide to go one or the other direction. Sometimes, they may pass through the post office and end up carrying packages, or maybe they'll go under a magical cloud that will change their sex. The path isn't the same for different ant cities, and so sometimes a trip to the grocery store takes longer but its possible to get to the post office quicker. In any case, the ants are so stupid they can only move forward, and eventually the path leads them right back to where they started from and they do it again.

In the above paragraph, the ants where bits, and each trip around they took around the city was a clock cycle. So if you have even a modicum of intelligence, you should readily realize that the clock cycles, or the number of trips the ants can make around their magical city, doesn't really mean anything if the cities are different. What's much more important is how many sets of ants can travel around these little paths, and how often they can do things like go to the post office to receive packages from the mystical valley of texture memory or send faxes to their sister city, mystical graphics town. Anyone who makes a statement inferring that that clock speed is so important that the Revolution won't even be as fast as an X-Box (even if they preface it by saying "on paper", which is like saying "in not-real terms") is being either accidentally or willfully dishonest.

The X-Box's magical ant city was based on an Intel computer chip, and even though I have no concept at all about the x86 architecture I would wager a confident guess that the city was filled with little stops and detours that probably made more sense when the city was located inside a computer than they did when it was put inside a game system. Maybe the ants had to make so many trips on the X-Box because stuff was really hard to get to, or when they went to the store to buy bread they had to leave and make another trip around to pick up the receipt.

But history has shown that Nintendo knows how to plan and build a magical ant cities dedicated to playing games. Their hardware is consistently cheaper than the competitions because they build it based on what they want to get out of it and in the process shave off tons of features and gizmos they don't need. Often times this leads them to do stupid things, like not put a CD drive in the N64 because it'll be much cheaper to use a cartridge port, or cut out HD support for a system that wouldn't really do it justice. When it comes to "performance" they usually deliver more than the specs they put out promise.

[Insert ending / summation paragraph here.]