IBM on board for Nintendo's next system

Computing giant IBM is now involved in chip design for all three next-generation consoles, announcing late last week that it will be providing processor technology for Nintendo's next games system.

The company demonstrated a supercomputer capable of performing 2 trillion operations per second, which it claimed was based on a variation of its PowerPC technology which will be rolled out in Nintendo's forthcoming hardware.

However, the system demonstrated was running on 1000 of the processors, and was roughly the size of a television. IBM highlighted the low power consumption and low heat of the individual components, suggesting that it'll be useful in miniaturisation efforts - something Nintendo has always been very keen on.

It's not clear whether the processors will be used in the "N5" home console, the successor to the GBA or even in the mystery product which Nintendo will unveil at E3 next May, but N5 does seem like the most likely candidate.

This confirms what many technology commentators had speculated some weeks ago - that the line-up of companies providing the core technologies for Nintendo's future efforts is almost identical to those working on the successor to Microsoft's Xbox, codenamed Xenon.

IBM - which is also one of Sony's technology partners on the next-generation Cell microprocessor to be used in the PlayStation 3 - will be replacing Intel as the supplier of core CPUs for Xenon, while ATI, already announced as Nintendo's graphics technology partner going forwards, will be replacing NVIDIA as Microsoft's provider for GPU technology.

IBM hopes to offset the costs of building supercomputers based on this technology - such as the forthcoming Blue Gene/L, which is being built for a laboratory in California - by licensing and selling the chip technology developed for them to game console manufacturers.