Absorbing Wii U architecture?

[walsufnir]

generic-user-1 said:

walsufnir said:

That would be too expensive, I guess. They could of course make the 3-cores be a part of the system to serve for helping the system in special tasks. That would mean the GPU is fully backwards compatible and the memory architecture is fast enough to "emulate" the esram used in WiiU. 

the gpu shouldnt be a problem and eSram with x86 is possible and not the worst road. changing the arm for the wiiu mainprocessor is a clever way to get BC relativy cheap. but if they go with fully x86(and a small arm) emulation shouldnt be such a big problem if nintendo makes it.

You can use esram wherever you want but it has to fit into the system somewhere. You can't just connect everything with everything :) Perhaps they try to "emulate" the esram with a different memory architecture that could well act as esram and can be used like main ram when not running in compatible mode.

As to emulation: This is a hard road to walk, as it takes a lot of effort to make it 

1. compatible

2. and in the same time fast enough.

Of course Nintendo knows how their hardware works but emulation in general needs way more performance than the system you want to emulate. What they could do is something that MS did: Do it on a per game basis so that a "general" emulator wouldn't be necessary but then again this also means a lot of work for Nintendo but could save a good amount of cycles.