I think Nintendo said that it was a GC times 2 …

That's not an entirely correct statment, a more accurate statement would be that the console with the best graphics (or the most powerful system) has never been the dominant console of a generation.

^yeah i guess that is more correct

I have tried to verbalize this same thought. I grew up with a NES then a SNES then a PS1. The graphics of the PS1 era amazed me. The graphics of this era are meh (have to go to the PC to really amaze me) but once you hit a certain point graphics don't mean that much any more and IMO we hit that point last generation, as evidenced by a significantly inferiror machine graphics wise leading the race.

Well as much as graphics don't matter anymore, that doesn't mean system power doesn't matter. There's a lot more to system power than graphics..

""Though technical specifications on the Revolution hardware are not yet available, Nintendo says their new console is only two or three times as powerful as the GameCube."

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3140623

I would go with the first thing they say. That would be about 200%-300% more powerful. Even if you look at numbers alon the wii is about 200% more poweful than the gamecube."

Two things I must say about that.

First, that news is from before Nintendo even renamed the system, and over a year and a half before it's launch. Therein you can't really be certain they stuck with the technical specifications mentioned in that article. Keep your hat on, I'm not saying Wii couldn't or isn't made with those specifications.

Second, the comment I made wasn't intended to say Wii is only 20% more powerful. Only the graphics, assuming I remembered correctly. That being said, I know the Wii as a whole is much more powerful than the GameCube. However, I was only speaking about the graphics, and not any of the other system functions, such as it's processing, etc. etc.

Except when the SNES outsold the Genesis.

 for some reason i always thought those two were identical in graphics

I never really saw any difference myself. In that generation I owned a Genesis and my uncle had an SNES and I honestly never saw a difference.

Well, the important question to ask is what are people measuring when they say the Wii is 2/3/4 times as powerful as the Gamecube?

What we know is the Wii has:

• A faster optical drive that has a higher disc capacity than the Gamecube
• Over double the memory that has lower latency and a higher data trasfer rate than the Gamecube's memory
• A CPU that has (roughly) double the transistors (potentially additional CISC instructions or additional cache) that runs at 1.5 times the clock speed of the Gekko
• A GPU that has (roughly) double the transistors (potentially additional texturing and lighting pipelines) that runs at 1.5 times the clock speed of the Flipper