Who are ArtX and what involvement do the company have with Dolphin?
ArtX is a graphics engineering start-up based in Palo Alto, California. The company, led by Silicon Graphics Inc.'s former head of Nintendo operations, Wei Yen, are developing the graphics chip for Dolphin. Incidentally, Yen and team were primarily responsible for Nintendo 64's graphic architecture. According to Nintendo of America chairman, Howard Lincoln, "Dr. Yen has assembled at ArtX one of the best teams of 3D graphics engineers on the planet". Lincoln seems sure that ArtX's graphic chip will compete on all levels, commenting, "We are absolutely confident that Dolphin's graphics will equal or exceed anything our friends at Sony can come up with for PlayStation 2".

What involvement do Matsushita have with Dolphin?
Matsushita, the largest consumer electronics company in the world, will develop, manufacture and supply to Nintendo a DVD disk drive for incorporation into the Dolphin. Also, stated Howard Lincoln, "Dolphin's technology will be integrated into various Matsushita or Panasonic-branded DVD consumer electronic products, enabling consumers to play movies and music as well as Dolphin games published by Nintendo and Nintendo's third party publishers". Nintendo and Matsushita hope to accomplish something that has never been executed successfully before - a convergence of videogame machine and movie-player. If successful, anybody who owns a compatible Matsushita/Panasonic DVD-player will also be able to play Dolphin games on their machine, just as Dolphin owners will be able to watch DVD movies.

What involvement do NEC have with Dolphin?
NEC, the maker of the PowerVR chipset used in Sega's Dreamcast, have signed with Nintendo to manufacture the ArtX-designed graphics accelerator for Dolphin. According to NEC's associate vice president, systems integration, Junshi Yamaguchi, the Nintendo graphics chipset will use as low as 8Mb and as high as 16Mb of on-board embedded DRAM. Comparatively, Sony's PS2 features 4Mb 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." The company are currently in the testing stages for their eDRAM technology and are reportedly working feverishly to finalise the manufacturing process in time for Nintendo's deadlines.

More next week... courtesy of IGN.com