Will the next generation Nintendo console be backwards compatible with the WII U ?

[Pemalite]

supernihilist said:
your OP is a joke.
dev costs are up 20% according to reports on new HW
I highly doubt WiiU games are more expensive to make than any other HD console. most ports were made in 6 months.

Development costs rising is because of moronic management, that seems to think the only way to make a great selling game is to pour $300 million into it, with $200 million just for advertisement.

There are plenty of smaller developers around that make games that are of equal or better quality than the big blockbuster expensive AAA games and have a tiny team and almost a non-existent development budget.

Most of the initial additional next-generation costs are due to the retooling of game engines (Which in turn requires staff to be re-trained and/or new staff), which wouldn't have been a problem if they didn't neglect the PC for almost a decade and refused to support the next generation effects that were readily available.
EA was well prepared with Frostbite if you hadn't noticed, they actually save money in the long run due to not having to license an engine such as Unreal or CryEngine.
They don't need to sink millions before/after the generations start to make games look next-gen, they were already at that level.

Thus, don't blame the platforms for costs rising, publishers are still taking home billions, so don't feel sorry for them.

fatslob-:O said:

Pemalite said:
I personally think they will shift over to ARM, they're cheap, lower power and AMD is now an ARM licensee and is now producing/Designing ARM chips, so they can make a very powerful console-orientated ARM SoC.
It wouldn't be a stretch to assume that it could end up with 8-16 ARM cores combined with a Radeon GPU.

And considering that the successor won't arrive for many years... ARM cores should be faster than Jaguar, easily.

With that in mind, it does mean Backwards compatibility would be broken at a hardware level.

Hmm ... I expect that nintendo's next generation SoC will likely feature a manufacturing process node of 14XM nm from global foundries or it could be TSMC's 16nm because I expect them to release a new console by 2016

Potentially speaking it could be possible for the new nintendo SoC to have 16 cortex A57 ARM cores so being more powerful than the lowly jaguars wouldn't be out of question. 

If they do pull off this move it could mean huge savings for development costs.

It's really not hard to make something faster than Jaguar. xD Even at 40nm... Or heck 65nm even.