Flipper
Flipper is the system chipset ASIC used in the GameCube. It is also often referred to as the GameCube's "GPU", since the GameCube's 3D acceleration hardware is included in Flipper as the GP set of blocks.
Flipper was designed by a team of engineers at ArtX, many of whom had previously worked on the N64 at SGI. It was intended in some ways to be a spritual successor to the N64's RCP chipset, addressing some of its flaws such as limited memory bandwidth and the need for complex microcode programming to adjust parameters.
Flipper was later extended into the Wii's Hollywood chipset, which itself had many of its blocks and interfaces survive into the Latte chipset. As such, it can be seen as the original version of the 'GameCube-compatible' chipset which was used by Nintendo from the GameCube through the Wii U.
Technical documentation
Some open documentation of Flipper is available at YAGCD
Revisions
Three revisions of Flipper are definitively known:
- Rev A (HW1 - an early, buggy version used in 2000, not compatible with retail games)
- Rev B (HW2 - used in late 2000-mid 2001)
- Rev C (HW3 - final hardware, largely compatible with HW2)
Some versions of the clkspeed.dol diagnostics tool also mention a 'rev T' of Flipper.
The Flipper revision letter is usually extracted with the following algorithm:
flipper_rev_letter = 'A' + (chip_id >> 28)
However, this doesn't actually work for rev T, which is defined as having an ID of 0x53200B1.
