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The Power Behind Nintendo 64

At the heart of Nintendo 64 are two powerful chips and an embedded software layer. The Reality Co-Processor (RCP), designed by Silicon Graphics specifically for Nintendo, captures the "experience" of Silicon Graphics digital media and visual computing power. Nintendo 64 also features a special version of the MIPS R4300i microprocessor designed by MIPS and manufactured by NEC Corporation using one of the most advanced commercial semiconductor process technologies in the world. The powerful R4300i processor is a compact 64-bit RISC processor with a five-stage pipeline for enhanced media processing.

PROCESSOR AND CO-PROCESSOR

Together, the processor and Reality Co-Processor have more than four million transistors. The R4300i processor runs at an internal clock speed of 93.75MHz and can perform 93 million operations per second, or 125 Dhrystone MIPS. It is rated at 60 SPECint92 and 45 SPECfp92. The RCP features a vector processor that can perform over a half a billion arithmetic operations per second, giving it approximately 10 times the raw compute power of some of the popular Intel Pentiums in use today.

AUDIO

The Reality Co-Processor provides Nintendo 64 with staggering audio capabilities. At its U.S. debut at the E3 show, one developer demonstrated a jazz fusion musical track-synthesized on-the-fly by the RCP-that sounded like a live performance. The audio system provides 16-bit stereo sound effects and MIDI music synthesis at CD sample rates of up to 48 kHz. It makes significant use of both the RCP and R4300i processor to synthesize and control a software assignable number of voices, each with high-quality pitch shifting, gain and pan, reverb and chorus, and externally created special effects.

3D GRAPHICS

The Nintendo 64 technology captures the experience of Silicon Graphics 3D visualization for home television. It includes the most advanced features necessary to create the immersive real-time game environment. These features include:


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