Clearing up a major misconception about PowerPC

[Alby_da_Wolf]

mine said:

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...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Architecture

Many years ago POWER was IBM-only, while PowerPC was the first alliance IBM made with Motorola and Apple to make simpler, more mainstream RISC CPUs initially utilising a hybrid IBM POWER and Motorola 88000 chip architecture and a subsed of the most used instructions in the POWER instruction set (while for POWER back compatibility the least used ones, not used for native PPC SW, where emulated).
Later PowerPC was merged back into the POWER architecture.
Since POWER8, IBM started licensing the whole designs of its high-end chips to partners http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation , but even before the POWER architectur had already become for years a multi-company alliance and IBM, despite making its chips under its brand, has been licensing its tech to other companies for years, as evident in the latest CPU used by Ninty, that despite not being a full POWER7 design, uses some POWER7 tech in an older overall PPC design.
The latest chips made by other companies are POWER, not just PowerPC, see for example Freescale: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/homepage.jsp?code=PCPPCP
What's true is that IBM in the past was willing to co-develop and produce also a full range of PowerPC CPUs  for desktop and notebook PCs, but starting with the notebook version it lost interest in it, forcing Apple to switch to x86, but even in recent times it's been willing to co-develop versions for consoles, the latest being Wii U's Espresso.