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ghost_of_fazz on 04 February 2013
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Soundwave said:

Nintendo is over engineering and over thinking their hardware.

They should've just used an AMD E6760, it would've saved them a lot in R&D costs and given them higher performance for probably an equivalent cost (maybe even cheaper) since it wouldn't be such a custom part (500+ GLFOPS easy). Third parties would like it better because it'd be easier to move PC games to the platform, and lets face it, Nintendo's own teams do fine on any hardware. And an E6760 only draws 35 watts and that's with GDDR5 memory, axe that and it would be even lower.

You could customize it a bit I'm sure too.

Insisting on such proprietary, customized hardware is killing Nintendo on cost, and they're not even getting great performance bang for their buck. For $350+  IMO, even with a 6 inch low-res LCD screen on the controller, they could've gotten a better piece of hardware from AMD.

I think this is where Yamauchi and Iwata are different, Yamauchi would opt to go with more standardized components if it meant cheaper cost/better performance.


This is what I was just thinking. The console is not really powerful, Bluray is much more common nowadays than in 2006 (and without royalties since it doesn't plays movies) and the screen on the controller is not that hi-tech... AND STILL Nintendo manages to lose money with every Wii U sold! I really don't understand what happened here. Maybe the GPU is so customized that it's expensive to produce en masse, or the (bad) engineering done at ( or "for") Nintendo was really expensive, or some supplier got Nintendo into a really bad business. Maybe Nintendo should start to engineer their future consoles in America or something, and leave only the concept to the Japanese.

About the bolded part... I'm not sure that Yamauchi was so different...  See the Nintendo 64 for example.