The Cobra board from Konami (which was incidentally designed by IBM) was shown in an early form with a 3D fighting game demo that supposedly only used 1/5th of the board's geometry potential.
Konami has boasted polygon handling performance of up to 5 million polygons/second and up to 250 million pixels/second. Resolutions for the board run from 640x400 up to 1,280x1,024 pixels. As a reference, Sega's Model 3 board (upon which Virtua Fighter 3 is based) handles up to 1 million polygons with a maximum resolution of 640x480.
The board itself is completely covered in heat sinks and fans which is somewhat unexpected given that the fastest processor in the system is a 100Mhz.
The main system is composed of three processors. The CPU is a PPC603e running at 100 Mhz. There is a secondary sub CPU system consisting of a PPC 604 also at 100Mhz and a PPC403 running at 33Mhz.
The raster engine has a 144 bit/pixel framebuffer including:
24 bit color (x2)
8 bit alpha channel
32 bit depth (w/floating point Z-buffers)
12 bit stencil
256 level alpha blending
The board can handle up to eight light sources consisting of parallel light, point light or spot lights. Environmental conditions such as linear and exponential fog are also supported with up to six clip planes.
Texture-mapping is supported with perspective correction, mipmapping as well as bilinear and trilinear filtering.
The board also provides hardware support for antialiasing (by subpixel sampling), flat and gouraud shading.
The sound system for the system is PCM 32 channel supporting 44.1kHz stereo output (CD quality). It also utilizes a 3D Effect Spatializer as developed by Desper Products to enhance the sound quality.
While the system specs are overwhelmingly impressive, what has been shown so far on the system has been somewhat disappointing given the framework of what should be possible (But this may be as a result of developing previously for the M2). So far some 3D fighting titles are underway (none of them are named as yet). The one non-playable game shown at AMOA utilized nearly one million polygons (on the order of Virtua Fighter 3) and was pretty, but still somewhat early.
Here's the Press release for the Cobra from Konami
I have a little more info and some screenshots of 2! games for the Cobra Cobra Games NEW
Given that Konami had previously signed on to do some M2 based arcade titles, in the light of the announcement of this new hardware it seems unlikely that it would choose to use the clearly inferior hardware of the M2.
Konami's Arcade line up are as follows. It's not known if the Cobra borad is being used for these games..but some of them look impressive.
GTI CLUB
GTI Club takes place on the Cote D'Azur. For the first time ever you will be able to race through a city and take shortcuts. You can choose from 5 different cars, and three difficulty levels. In easy mode you are allowed access to two shortcuts. In hard mode your driving skill will be challenged as every shortcut in the game is accessible. If you choose the toughest difficulty mode, you will be able to access all of the shortcuts and race the course backwards. The shortcuts include tunnels, fountains, alleys, cafes, and much more. When playing with your friends you can play tag with a bomb and hunt them down for added excitement. Up to four players can play simultaneously.
Beat the Champ, the perfect competition game! Nine events in five different sports with two degrees of difficulty. Tournament action, dual illuminated track-balls, and split screen for head to head action.
Wave Shark, all the thrills of wave running have been brought to your loacal arcade. This game enables you to feel the realistic wave runner without ever getting wet. You can select from 3 courses. Wave Shark is linkable up to four players for the best in water racing!
Winding Heat takes place on winding rural highways. The lengthy courses deliver fresh excitement to car race fans tired of driving games that leave you driving around in circles. You start the game by choosing from 3 courses, then select your street machine from 14 different sports cars. Your car can be customized with enhanced acceleration, grip, handling, or maximum speed.
Run & Gun 2 uses the latest in motion capture technology!