By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
curl-6 on 26 August 2013
Edit Thread
unaveragejoe said:
curl-6 said:
WagnerPaiva said:
In indisight, Nintendo should have made sure everything on its system was better than the 7 years old HD twins, it would spare then a lot of criticism and would not cost that much more.

Backwards compatibility is the primary culprit; in order to ensure the system could play Wii games, they had to pick a CPU from the same product line, instead of a newer and more powerful design.

That's not accurate. It could use more than one processor to be backward compatible. Is it the most powerful CPU in all the galaxy? No, but you can't just add multicore , change the die size and increase the cache 10 fold by just saying Hokus Pokus. Regardless the Wii U was designed for the load to be shared not just by the CPU or GPU to get the most out of it.

It was most convenient for Nintendo to keep it PPC750 based though, that meant that to run Wii games they just had to use one of the three cores, downclock it to Wii speed, and use only 256kb of its L2 cache.

I do agree that it is an underestimated part though, and that with its GPGPU the console was clearly designed for share the load of traditionally CPU-assigned tasks.