What involvement does NEC have with Dolphin?
NEC, the maker of the PowerVR chipset used in Sega’s Dreamcast, has signed with Nintendo to manufacture the Art-X-designed graphics and memory semiconductors for use with Dolphin. According to NEC’s associate vice president, systems integration, Junshi Yamaguchi, the Nintendo graphics chipset will use as low as 8MBs and as high as 16MBs of the embedded 1T-SRAM. Comparatively, Sony’s PS2 features 4MBs on its graphics chip, but also draws upon additional system RAM continuously. It is not yet known just how much system RAM Nintendo’s machine will include. The deal with Nintendo marks NEC’s first real commercial business for eDRAM, said Yamaguchi. “And if it goes well we will expand eDRAM to use in networking and other applications, so we are making the Nintendo project a strategic priority.” NEC is spending an estimated 80 billion-yen ($761 million) to construct a factory in southern Japan that will concentrate on the production of Dolphin semiconductors. The company began development of
