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Soundwave on 11 September 2012
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HappySqurriel said:
Soundwave said:

I think it's true.

They released some detailed specs around last E3 too.

"Based on Power7" is a term that can be wildly stretched in a lot of ways.

If it was a legit Power7, it would blow the PS3/360 out of the water (and probably melt that case), but devs have already come out and said the CPU isn't all that great. The GPU is supposedly decent.

Honestly, buy Nintendo systems for Nintendo's games. Any decent third party stuff is a bonus and you'll be happy. This was never going to compete with PS4/720 on power, Nintendo got out of that race when the Wii brand as a whole was introduced.

IMO Nintendo designed something that got to just above XBox 360 in horsepower and that could fit into a very compact case. That's their priority. Along with something that could be sold for cheap. Their priority is not people who need to DX11 effects/Unreal 4 engine graphics. What Nintendo IP even needs that kind of power? Nintendo is not greenlighting a 100 million dollar Metroid game fellas. For third parties ... well that's going to be their issue if they want to port games or not. 

We know that the Wii/Gamecube is based off of a PowerPC 7xx series processor, which had at most 2 cores, ran at a peak of 2.5 GHz, and IBM (essentially) ended all R&D on several years ago ...

There is 0% chance of this rumour being true.

As for the energy consumption, IBM has bragged that the Power7 architecture was 3 to 4 times as powerful as the Power6 architecture while using 1/4 to 1/3 as much energy. I don't think it is much of a stretch to think that one of these processors at (close to) the low end for number of cores and running at (close to) the low end for clock speed for the Power7 series would be able to fit into something as small as the Wii U.

Nintendo is a client, IBM may have stopped active R&D on this years ago, but if its something Nintendo requested, I'm sure it's something IBM would look into it. It's not as if they took all their documentation for Broadway and burnt it. 

We also need to remember the PS3/360 have big problems emulating/running PS2/XBox content. Basing the CPU on Broadway likely helps Nintendo keep full compatibility with the original Wii.

It also falls in line with some devs/speculation commenting on the CPU not being so great ... if we're talking a legit Power7, it would rip the PS3/360 apart, but not one developer has said that even if some have been complimnetary towards the amount of RAM (double the PS3/360 apparently) and the GPU.