Ura: Money well spent? Have you made a coffin for your PS2 yet?
I have spent quite a while going over the system stats, on the official sites, for Gamecube and XBox.
Sega will be working with Nintendo for their mainstream games for Gamecube, such as the Sonic series. XBox will only be receiving a few of Sega's lesser secondary games.
The XBox will be a 733 cpu, single processor. What that means is that it will essentially be a computer in a box. A 733 one, nonetheless. Which means it will be outdated in a short while.
The Gamecube, as most consoles have been before it, will have multiple processors to do its various functions, such as one for sound, one for video, one for control, one for 3D graphics, and so on. All of these processors together work for the overall system, instead of one processor.
This can be made easier to understand with a simple example.
Why can you not run a N64 emulator on a Pentium 200 cpu? After all the 64 processors run at 94 mhz! Why not? Because the N64 has multiple processors that, for the most part, work at that speed. Hence, the N64 has about the capabilities of a, to quote the vernacular, "seriously beefed up" 533 computer.
Therefore, with the Gamecube processors running near 500 mhz, and there being multiple processors, the Gamecube will not only far outdo XBox, but receive incredible software support, as the PS2 is (finally) dead. And N64's only real rival for software support was Playstation.
(The PS2 is officially recognized as a "gone" system- I believe Sony made that judgement after seeing that since PS2's release, just from the release date of the PS2, the original Playstation has made a much higher gross profit. The notoriety for PS2 being almost impossible to develop for also helps for that judgement.)
Furthermore, the Gamecube was so easy to develop for, that Rogue Squadron 2 only took the developers 2 weeks to make it for the Gamecube.
Ah yes, and one can check out the screenshots for Gamecube under the "News" section of the Nintendo site. The screenshots are, to be frank, spectacular. The release date is November 5; in the US, that is.