I see a lot of discussions about the performance of the Wii U about how it will perform compared to the current HD consoles. For the most part people are foolishly assumptions that, even though Nintendo drastically changed their hardware strategy from the Gamecube to the Wii, Nintendo would obviously replicate the same strategy on the Wii U that they used with the Wii; and then they use this to draw the flawed conclusion that the Wii U would only be as powerful (or less powerful) than the current HD consoles. Even though I disagree with this reasoning, I thought I would address what that would really mean ...
The Wii U is being released 7 years after the XBox 360 and coincidentally the Wii was released 7 years after the Dreamcast; if Nintendo repeated the same strategy with the Wii U you would expect the performance improvement to be similar to the difference between the Dreamcast and the Wii.
Dreamcast:
Wii:
The point of this post isn't to suggest what strategy Nintendo is following, the point is to demonstrate that even the "Wii Strategy" would produce a substantially more powerful system than we have with the HD consoles currently.
