The good people at IGNcube scored an interview with Giles Goddard. For those who don't know, Giles was the lead programmer on 1080º Snowboarding. He's good friends with many important people at Nintendo (including Shigeru Miyamoto) and he is in the unique position of having first hand knowledge of the PlayStation 2 and the GameCube hardware. Check out this excerpt from IGNcube's interview:

IGNcube: What do you think of the GameCube hardware itself?

Giles: It has a lot of things that other console makers either hadn't thought of, or couldn't do. Such as decent texture compression, for example. I've yet to see the H/W running full speed but from what I've seen it will give PS2 and XBox a decent fight. You also have to remember that consoles are starting to level off now. A lot of what makes a console powerful nowadays has to do with balance. For instance the PS2 can draw a lot more than it can calculate.

IGNcube: Now that you've had a chance to work on PS2 software via Video System, how does Sony's console compare to GameCube technically? What are the advantages and disadvantages of both?

Giles: As I said, PS2 can 'draw' 30 odd million triangles / second, the problem is you can't even come close to calculating enough vertices to send to the GS [Graphics Synthesizer] to draw that many. So most of the draw time on PS2 games is used to add effects to polygons already on the screen. I think the GameCube has less of a bottleneck between calculating and drawing and more thought has gone into how data is moved around efficiently. So I think this will mean it has more usable polygons to play with.

IGNcube: Do you know what titles NCL is working on for GameCube?

Giles: [typing] my kyboad hasbe com stuk...

You can read the whole thing right HERE!