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The 'Avatar' Hoax - 3/8/99 - 3:04:57 PM

A few days ago, FG-Online fell for a hoax, an email supposably from NEC was taken as truthful information and thus posted. It turns out to be a hoax as most people predicted. As, it would be very stupid of Sega to post specs for a successor when their current product is just gathering steam. Anyway, here is a copy of the e-mail. Remember, it is only heresy, and not the truth. When a new console is announced (I imagine not for several years), you will hear about it through Sega or another official PR.

Straight out of NECs research labs here is some info on Sega's next hardware project, code named "Avatar". Specs
and early real-time demo screen shots included. Enjoy. You don't have to thank me :)

CPU - Handles 3D Transformation
Hitachi UH1 (Ultra Hitachi 1)
Clock Speed:  800mhz
L1 cache size: 512k
Floating Point Performance: 16 GFLOPS max
Integer Performance: 1500 MIPS
Bus size: 256 bits
Bus bandwidth: 8.4 Gigabytes/second
Transistors: 120 million
Manufacture: .13 micron
Able to calculate  100 million polygons/second

Co-processor - Handles Artificial Intelligence/Artificial Life, Collision Detection & MPEG2&3 Decoding
NEC 8600
Clock Speed: 200mhz
Floating Point Performance: 1.8 GFLOPS max
Integer Performance: 400 MIPS
Bus size: 64 bits
Bus bandwidth: 1.2 Gigabytes/second
Transistors: 26 million
Manufacture: .18 micron

Graphics Processor
PowerVR chip code named "Excelsior"
Clock Speed: 300mhz
Bus size: 256 bits
Fill Rate: 8.4 full featured billion pixels/second (deferred rendered)
Max resolution: 1920x1200 @ 32bit color
Max texture resolution: 4096x4096
Max color: 48bit RGBA
Effects:
	* Perspective correct true-color Gouraud lighting
	* Perspective correct transparency
	* Perspective correct texture mapping
	* Trilinear and anisotropic filtering
	* Depth buffering
	* Full Scene Anti-aliasing
	* Fog and depth cue with vertex level control
	* Scissor and stipple masking
	* Full alpha blending modes supported
	* Specular highlights
	* 48-bit floating-point Z buffering
	* Environment mapping
	* 32 Overlay planes
	* 8x8 Anti-aliasing multisampling
	* Volumetric effects
	* Hardware translucency sorter
	* 256 layers of translucency
	* True Bumpmapping
	* True Phong shading and lighting
	* True Raytracing
	* 100 million textured, gourad shaded, lighted
polygons/second
	* 60 Million polygons/second with ALL effects enabled

Sound processor
Clock Speed: 100mhz
Voices: 256
	* Vortex2 technology

Other Information
	* 64MB of main RDRAM, 32MB of RDRAM for textures
	* DVD-ROM media format
	* Backward compatible to Dreamcast due to emulation
	* Expected release date is sometime in 2002 in Japan 



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