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Mnementh on 30 July 2013
| catofellow said: One factor in my opinion going against Nintendo long term is their use of an IBM CPU. Apple, Sony, and Microsoft have all ended support for IBM CPU's, and Nintendo is the last holdout I am aware of in the gaming software space. Software developers would like to focus on x86 processors or ARM processors, both to allow for ports between platforms, and to reduce the skill sets they need to maintain within staff. Nintendo will enjoy XBOX 360 and PS3 ports for the time being, but eventually the Wii U will be significantly under powered compared to modern consoles and PC's with a completely different architecture. That will not make it easy for developers to port to or from other platforms. I'm no techie, but I think this will be an issue long term. |
As a programmer I can assure you, that all modern processor-architectures are no problem for porting software. Compilers pretty much take care of the different instruction-sets. The features included in the instruction-sets are more and more similar. So that is no problem in porting. The overall architecture of the machine has more influence, and WiiU with the classical GPU/CPU-approach and split memory is much nearer to PC-development than PS4 with the unified memory (I think XBO has also unified memory, but could be wrong on this). While this may have big advantages it makes development very different to PCs-
