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phaedruss on 30 July 2014
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Soundwave said:


I'll go one further and say if you were allowed into Nintendo's R&D facility today you would see working prototypes of their next gen handheld already there. Not just drawings/schematics, but actual physical hardware that you pick up. Maybe even play (they probably have tried porting some 3DS or Wii U software to it, early GBA prototypes were running Yoshi's Story from the N64 on them I think). I think hardware wise they are probably in the final design stages and software development will likely start to ramp up in the next few months. 

My guess is the next Mario Galaxy game and Animal Crossing game will pass on the Wii U and go directly to being launch titles for the new handheld. They will need it -- I think one of the bitter lessons Nintendo learned this gen they can't afford to half-ass a launch, if you do that, then you will be scrambling to "relaunch" for the next several months, even years. 

I think PowerPC is out too -- too exotic (meaning a higher cost to mass produce) of a chip. ARM will be Nintendo's partner, I think Qualcomm will get the nod for the GPU since Nintendo's Tech division head apparently used to work for Qualcomm. ARM + Qualcomm will probably give Nintendo a price that the likes of IBM + AMD simply can't match either. 


Yea not to mention the new handheld will be backwards compatible with the wii u so it will have those games as well which will be new for a lot of people.