Nintendo GameCube Hardware information

Hardware specifications
The GameCube's model numbers, DOL-001 and 101, are a reference to its "Dolphin" codename. All of its official accessories and peripherals have model numbers beginning with DOL as well. Also, many other Nintendo hardware before and after the GameCube has its developers codename as a model number. Another Dolphin reference, "Flipper" is the name of the GPU for the GameCube.

Some benchmarks provided by third-party testing facilities indicate that some of these specifications, especially those relating to performance, may be conservative. One of Nintendo's primary objectives in designing the GameCube hardware was to overcome the perceived limitations and difficulties of programming for the N64 architecture, creating an affordable, well-balanced, developer-friendly console that still performs competitively against its rivals. On a side note, unofficial reports claim that the Wii's architecture is derived from that of the GameCube.


Central processing unit
486 MHz IBM "Gekko" PowerPC CPU.

PowerPC 750CXe based core.
180 nm IBM copper-wire process. 43 mm² die. 4.9 W dissipation.
Roughly 50 new vector instructions.
32-bit ALU. 64-bit FPU, usable as 2x32-bit SIMD
1.9Gflops on fpu (10Gflops means the whole unit in operations such as geometry engine, T&L, TEV and other, this number is not all on the CPU)
64-bit enhanced PowerPC 60x front side bus to GPU/chipset. 162 MHz clock. 1.3 GB/s peak bandwidth.
64 KiB L1 cache (32 KiB I/32 KiB D). 8-way associative. 256 KiB on-die L2 cache. 2-way associative.
1125 DMIPS (dhrystone 2.1)

System memory
43 MiB total non-unified RAM

24 MiB MoSys 1T-SRAM (codenamed "Splash") main system RAM. 324 MHz, 64-bit bus. 2.7 GB/s bandwidth.
3 MiB embedded 1T-SRAM within "Flipper".
Split into 1 MiB texture buffer and 2 MiB frame buffer.
10.4 GB/s texture bandwidth (peak). 7.6 GB/s framebuffer bandwidth (peak). ~6.2 ns latency.
16 MiB DRAM used as buffer for DVD drive and audio. 81 MHz, 8-bit bus. 81 MB/s bandwidth.

Graphics processing unit and system chipset
162 MHz "Flipper" LSI. 180 nm NEC eDRAM-compatible process. Co-developed by Nintendo and ArtX.

4 pixel pipelines with 1 texture unit each
TEV "Texture EnVironment" engine (similar to "pixel shader")
Fixed-function hardware transform and lighting (T&L). 12+ million polygons/s in-game.
648 megapixels/second (162 MHz x 4 pipelines), 648 megatexels/second (648 MP x 1 texture units) (peak)
Peak triangle performance: 20,250,000 32pixel triangles/sec raw and with 1 texture and lit
337,500 triangles a frame at 60fps
675,000 triangles a frame at 30fps
8 texture layers per pass, texture compression, full scene anti-aliasing
Bilinear, trilinear, and anisotropic texture filtering
Multi-texturing, bump mapping, reflection mapping, 24-bit z-buffer
24-bit RGB / 32-bit RGBA color depth.
Hardware limitations sometimes require a 6r+6g+6b+6a mode (18-bit color), resulting in color banding.
640×480 interlaced or progressive scan
Integrated audio processor: Custom 81 MHz Macronix DSP
Instruction Memory: 8 KiB RAM, 8 KiB ROM
Data Memory: 8 KiB RAM, 4 KiB ROM
64 channels 16-bit 48 kHz ADPCM
Dolby Pro Logic II encoded within stereophonic output