IBM is now involved in chip design for all three next-generation consoles. Recently it announced that it will be providing

Sony earlier this year confirmed that IBM-developed product will make it into Sony's Playstation 3.

This month Microsoft signed IBM to produce the chip that will be used to power Xbox 2.

And now IBM announced it made with Nintendo. IBM also developed the chip for the GameCube, a PowerPC 400 series based processor codenamed 'Gekko'. The choice therefore didn't suprise us.

IBM demonstrated a supercomputer capable of performing 2 trillion operations per second, which it claimed was based on a variation of its PowerPC technology which will be rolled out in Nintendo's forthcoming hardware.

This confirms what many had already speculated some weeks ago: the core technologies for Nintendo's next console will be almost identical to the successor of Microsoft's Xbox.

More as it breaks!