Gekko (CPU)

The GameCube CPU is the IBM PowerPC Gekko:

• Runs at 486 Mhz
• 32-bit
• 64-bit Floating Point Unit
• 32 KiB L1 Instruction Cache
• 32 KiB L1 Data Cache¹
• 256 KiB L2 Unified Cache
• Single core
• Pipelined (instructions are divided into multiple stages of execution, allowing multiple instructions to be at different stages at the same time)
• Superscalar (contains multiple execution units which can work on independent instructions at the same time)
• Contains a SIMD extension geared torwards 3D graphics called “Paired Singles”

1. The data cache can be split into two 16 KiB sections and one of them can be mapped into memory to be used as a “scratchpad” (super fast RAM). ↩