Wii U is "effectively a 360" says Microsoft

[archbrix]

Adinnieken said:

archbrix said:
Well, it's PR talk so it's no surprise to hear this, but I just don't get the general consensus behind this opinion. Games like Pikmin 3 and Project P-100 (in addition to Assassin's Creed 3, Aliens, Darksiders, etc) would be right at home visually on the 360 or PS3 RIGHT NOW in their matured lifespan... and WiiU hasn't even been released yet.

Gears of War handily dwarfed the 360's launch games just a year later, so saying that WiiU is "basically on par with Xbox 360" based solely on what we've seen so far is quite premature; particularly considering what we know/have heard concerning specs.

The Wii U has a quad-core processor based on the Power7 processor running at 3GHz.  The Xbox 360 has a tri-core based on the Power5+ processor running at 3.2GHz.

The challenge is this.  If we look at the specs, there is an improvement over the Xbox 360, but the problem is one report has suggested that the processor in the Wii U is nerfed at 2 hardware threads per core, rather than 4 hardware threads.  Thus the improvement in processing power over the 360 is significantly less.

I don't think Microsoft is arguing that the power of the Wii U is a 1:1 facsimile of the Xbox 360.  However, so far I don't think any of the reports that have come out have suggested that it is so significantly better than the Xbox 360 that a developer couldn't easily develop a game for both the 360 and the Wii U given the similarity in hardware and controller scheme with the Pro controller.

In other words, I think Microsoft is trying to suggest to developers.  Hey, if you have something you're doing specifically for the Wii U, you can probably make it work just as easily on the Xbox 360.  The flip side of that possibly being just as true.

 

While I certainly don't expect the WiiU's POWER7 to be "Watson" powerful, neither Nintendo nor IBM have confirmed the number of active cores, threads per core, clock rate, amount of cache, etc.  So while there is that report that you speak of, there are also other opinions (such as Gearbox's Randy Pitchford) that indicate the CPU is more powerful than the Xenon.  And with the strongly rumored GPU (R700 family) and the all-but-confirmed increase in RAM (nearly 3 times as much), making WiiU games a year or so down the road work on 360 may not be as easy as you think; especially when regarding simultaneously active screens in use.  In any case, saying WiiU is basically on par with 360, as Spencer suggests, is what I was contesting since I believe it's too early to declare that.

Incidentally, is it just me or does anyone else find it strange that it's almost always GamesIndustry.biz where these reports of WiiU's "underpowered" hardware emanate from?