Wii U hardware no longer sold at loss, apparently

[biglittlesps]

MarcellusMighty said:
I'm just going to say this again because the people who make the 'hardware costs too much for low-specs' argument need to use their brains and research instead of spreading ignorance. The Wii U is very powerful, and since the design eschews blu-ray, media capabilities, and other bells and whistles that Xbox and PS focus on, the budget is dedicated to the controller and gaming performance. For the thousandth time, the clock rate of a CPU doesn't really matter anymore these days as long as efficiency is there. A 1.6 Ghz. Core i7 from 2008 (first-gen) will handily outperform a Pentium 4 at 4 Ghz, or even a Core 2 series at a higher clock speed.

We won't know exactly what enhancements Nintendo made to the PPC 750 base architecture, but even a 1.4 GHz. 3-core PPC is more efficient than what's in the others. It's common knowledge by now that x86 is an inefficient gaming architecture as compared to PowerPC. In some cases, the Wii U processor can outperform the newer consoles in certain areas. But it's the ESRAM that is making all of these 1080p games possible, or at least the 60fps. Everything in the Wii U is balanced, and they work together as a cohesive whole.

Long story short, the Wii U may not have Ronaldo on the team, but the parts inside work together and play like the Bulls did this season without any big stars.

Yes, its very efficient design but only useful if they take advantage of it by coding the game around this architecture which is possible only with First party. So, 3rd parties need easy development environment and reasonable hardware close to the other platforms to develop otherwise there are gonna skip which is happening now.