| silicon said: From a recent interview with John Carmack, it sounded like next gen games will either boost games to 1080p or 60fps before hitting a wall so it doesn't sound like the difference will be ground breaking. |
No, you're mis-interpreting what he said. He was only talking about the initial games for next-gen consoles, or those who will be made for current-gen then ported to next-gen. And he's right, just look at the first few Xbox 360 games, they were nothing more than Xbox or PS2 games upscaled to 720p, with a few shiny textures here and there.
Anyway it's pointless to argue this whole topic as long as we don't know the technical specs of the WiiU. And no, vaguely worded PR speak from IBM or AMD doesn't tell us much of anything interesting. There's no such thing as an R700 GPU. There is a series of R700 GPUs that range from the lowly RV710 with 80 SPUs (that's less powerful than the Xbox 360's GPU) up to the power hungry RV790 with 800 SPUs. Similarly, POWER7 isn't a processor, it's the name of the architecture several server processors from IBM use. To make one of them suitable for a console would require some modifications that can range from reduced amount of cache, less cores, smaller frequencies, making them in-order instead of out-of-order and so on, all of that hugely impacts performance. Not to mention the way IBM worded their press release we can't even be sure the CPU is based on POWER7.
