Revolution Report: Is Hollywood based off Flipper, a current or upcoming PC architecture, or built from the ground up?

Swinimer: Hollywood is a specific design and is in no way reflective of PC technology. Even when the Flipper chips came out, people were asking that question: "Is this a spin-off of something done on the PC?", and the answer is no. It is designed the same as the Flipper was -- from the ground up for a specific console. Totally different sort of architecture from what you might find on the PC. Certainly, there are some underlying values-you know, how you get graphics on the screen-that's there. It's not, for example, like we took a PC design and said 'oh, you know what? If we tweak this and test this, it will work in a console.' [That's] not the case.

Revolution Report: A number of Web sites have inferred that Revolution will be significantly inferior graphically. While it certainly seems like Revolution won't output in HD, is it safe to assume that Hollywood will not feature a comparable polygon count or the same amount of graphical effects as the Xbox 360's GPU?

Swinimer: What I can say is that ATI is focused, as is Nintendo, in making [Revolution] a great, gaming entertainment platform. I know that a lot of journalists are very focused on specs. It's the big thing; as a geek, I look for that too. The key thing to keep in mind is that Nintendo, with ATI's help, is trying to create a game console where you don't have to look at [specs].

From a broader perspective, we share in Nintendo's position that this console will be devoted to the general gamer. When you have a game developer developing [for] this, the goal is to ensure that they don't have to worry about the complexity that is required to develop the games by making them "jump through hoops." That was one of the benefits of working on the GameCube; developers were saying that it is quite easy to develop for and there are not a lot of complexities so they could produce titles easily. That being said, we want consumers to look at the game, play the game and be involved in it. We are doing our very best to make this Nintendo gaming experience the very best it can be.