Wii U has “capability issues” due to single processor,says VentureBeat’s Takahashi

[NightDragon83]

JEMC said:

Soleron said:

JEMC said:
Just to clarify, what does he mean with "single processor"? Is he talking about the CPU, the GPU or another thing?

I don't think he understands technology at all.

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Rendering to two screens is as hard as rendering to one screen with twice the resolution or framerate, and the tablet screen is optional much like the second screen on the DS was. Number of cores/GPUs doesn't come into it; game devs can just have the tablet screen blank if they want to make the TV screen look better.

Thanks for the answer.

I asked that because the console only has 1 CPU, but it has 3 cores so he couldn't be talking about it, and given that most WiiU games will be 720p on the TV and the screen of the gamepad probably isn't HD, the GPU shouldn't have a problem dealing with them, at least for now.

I think he meant that since the tablet controller has no on board CPU and instead streams all video directly from the hardware, the Wii U's CPU is essentially doing double duty, though I can't really imagine the workload being that much more.  This is more of a RAM issue, and the Wii U is alleged to have at least 1.5GB, with up to 512MB dedicated to the OS and multitasking.  A multithread tri-core processor like what the Wii U is rumored to have should have no problem handling the work load.