Anonymous Dev documents Wii U experience

[AnthonyW86]

walsufnir said:

AnthonyW86 said:
This pretty much sums it up i guess. What i don't get is if power consumption was so important to them why didn't they go with a ARM cpu? Backward compatibility really isn't that important, and using a ARM cpu would have allowed them to redisign the Wii-U into a real tablet in the near future. Even X86 would have been way better.

 

ARM is way worse than the CPU in Wii U. And bc was always important to them.

ARM cpu these are actually really good, especially if you are looking for something that doesn't take to much power. It has taken Intel years to get a X86 chip that can give some competition in this market. When it comes to raw performance even older ARM chips beat the 360's Xenon in per core performance, definitely at higher clock speeds. It's to bad we don't know when these first plans were made but i'm guessing it must have been 2009 or even earlier, before Nintendo could have known mobile chips would develop so fast or that X86 might have been an option.

Even with the current PowerPC based design, why go so low in power? Wii-U power draw is less then 40W at most for the enitre system, upping the clock speed considerably would still have kept the power consumption at very acceptabel rates.