| Soleron said: Since the GPU is extremely likely to be AMD (has been last three times and there's only two options for console graphics), I was hoping for some sort of Fusion (AMD CPU and GPU on one die) which would save a lot of money (MS and Sony did this on their consoles later on). Abandoning POWER used in GC and Wii's CPU means that Wii 2 will be harder to transition to for third parties. It better be worth it to get the quad-core ARM. Though power efficiency will be extremely good as a result, probably less than the Wii. Nintendo never design for performance, it's always for cost. |
"When the developers said that they had hard times in order to get the expected performance, it actually has something to do with what Mr. Miyamoto said right now, namely, he prefers to have a machine which can yield stable performance. This is something both Mr. Miyamoto and I had a challenging time with as software developers, so maybe this is not a pleasing subject for Mr. Takeda, but we did experience a lot of hardships when working on Nintendo 64."
" And then, after we have incorporated everything, we find that the software does not work. When just one designer, be it Mr. Miyamoto, me or someone else, did some extra effort in order to make slightly better graphics, the total frame rate greatly decreased. Such things happened, and we had a hard time dealing with them. The biggest trouble with Nintendo 64 was, when something unexpected happened, we could not tell why it had happened. At one time, the system was working just fine, but at some other time, the anticipated performance could not be generated. When we happened to be able to make it right, it was very quick, say, something like a tuned-up sports car, which could not show its maximum performance otherwise. That lesson we learned from Nintendo 64 was taken into consideration when we designed Nintendo GameCube, and the learning through the development of this hardware was there when we designed Wii. The developers have been able to take advantage of the performance of Wii for such a long period of time since it was launched, and this fact must have something to do with how Mr. Takeda and the other hardware developers have made the most of the experiences and expertise they have learned from Nintendo 64, and Nintendo, as an organization, has recognized the importance of a machine for which software developers can always expect stable performance from the hardware."
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/101029qa/03.html
From Iwata himself.
Now the platform which can offer them the best consistancy is probably X86 for the CPU and from that the GPU can be tuned to work well within the programming environment. This is especially the case when the development machines are all compatible with the programs designed for the console.
Tease.
