Clearing up a major misconception about PowerPC

[mine]

Alby_da_Wolf said:

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.

POWER is only made by IBM. PowerPC is licensed. And POWER doesn't mean that all PowerPC instructions are available.

You can't downscale the POWER chip easily. Its a super complex multi-core beast designed for multi socket. 

Also a low power consumption was not the "primary design goal" of the POWER chips.

Nintendo got the best what they could get cheap. And its fast enough as it has a clever design like asymetric caches...