Supposedly, Final WiiU Specs from VGLeaks

[zarx]

Soundwave said

Yeah that's been speculated too, one Power7-ish core + 2 enhanced Broadway style cores.

It seems obvious Nintendo was going for something with a little more kick to it than an XBox 360. If souping up the Broadway got them to the performance target they wanted ... really who cares. It's just a name.

If the Wii U CPU was wildly more powerful than the 360/PS3, don't you think we would've heard something about it now? Nintendo got the performance they wanted at the price they wanted. They've said themselves, they have to be able to sell the Wii U at a price affordable to kids, they're not just making something for 20-30 year old tech heads who can spend $400+.

I imagine even at this spec at $249.99 they may be losing a few dollars ($299 and $350 SKUs would be profitable most likely though)

It should easily outclass the 360  that is for sure. But it's also in the same ball park, unless it's clocked really high. Once devs get up to speed it should produce some really nice resaults there is no doubt about that.

But it should be kept in mind the average Wii U game will be doing a more than an average PS360 game due to the screen on the tab, and i imagine the rich OS features that the console will likely have. Having a UI that pulls up instantly and lets you chat with freinds etc will be a nice feature as well.

The advantage of using dated GPU and CPU tech would of course be that licencing will be a lot cheaper, and low power/heat, and they will definately be using modern mature manufacturing proccess (45nm for CPU/GPU from the sound of things) which should allow high yeilds. If they are using a system on a chip design (like the redesigned 360) they can cut board complexity especially with 1 pool of unified RAM. That and the small power effeciant design that should allow them to keep costs really low. The tab shouldn't be all that expensive to make ether with a rather low resolution small resistive touch screen in addition to a normal controler, I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to get change from $250US TBH, especially as they aren't using a mechanical HDD and no movie playback licensing fees. MS can make a profit off the Xbox 360 S 4 GB – $199.99 with 3 pack in games from different publishers, Nintendo breaking even on the Wii U at $250 doesn't seem all that outlandish to me.