14 DAY TRIAL // An anonymous source has stated that the upcoming Nintendo 3DS handheld, which is the first gaming device set to deliver full three dimensional gaming experiences without the use of glasses, will be powered by the same combination of two ARM11 Central Processing Units, the same that have been used in the Zune HD music player from Microsoft and in now obsolete versions of the iPhone and the iPod Touch.
The two chips will be running at 266 MHz and the new handheld device will also include a Graphical Processing Unit running at 133 MHz.
The Nintendo platform is also rumored to include 4 GB of dedicated video RAM and 64 MB of normal memory.
Internal storage capacity is apparently set for 1.5 GB, which is much more than the 256 MB that the DSi has been packing.
Nintendo has not officially reacted to the information offered by the anonymous source and the Japanese company is well known for not commenting on rumors in order to make sure that it does not accidentally reveal anything about its devices.
The specifications leaked for the Nintendo 3DS are a bit below what users can get from smartphones at the moment but this does not mean that the device will be less powerful.
A smartphone needs to use an operating system which eats up a lot of resources while the Nintendo DS only needs to run a basic system and video games, meaning that it could offer a significant performance increase over the current generation of DS.
The Nintendo 3DS was revealed earlier in the year for fear that the Japanese press was close to leaking details about the device.
Nintendo currently plans to launch the system in Japan late in 2010, with an official date and pricing revealed at the end of the month, with the device also coming to North America and to Europe in late spring 2011.