WolfpackN64 said:
The point I'm trying to make is that PowerPC in itself is not outdated, as sometimes claimed, but the Wii U's CPU in a way is. |
This. Don't know if anybody already pointed it out, but I'd like to add that POWER is still a very scalable architecture, IBM mainly designs high-end models currently, but its partners in the project also design models down to cheap and power thrifty single core embedded versions or even multicores where each core is a lightweight version, for high-end routers, for example, that need to execute large numbers of simple tasks.
Ninty chose an evolution of a quite dated version ( not exactly definable in a single POWER or PowerPC family, it has a more dated PPC base with a few more modern POWER7 features http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espresso_%28microprocessor%29 ), but, while POWER8 hadn't been launched yet and POWER7+ was maybe too recent to already have cheap enough versions (the first models launched were fast high-end server versions) when Wii U was launched, Ninty could have easily chosen a POWER7 chip scaled exactly to its needs about power, power consumption and price.
