What should Nintendo have done instead of Wii U?

[curl-6]

Pemalite said:

curl-6 said:

Wii U's CPU (Espresso) was sacrificed on the altar of backwards compatibility and power consumption. In order for it to natively play Wii games they stuck with the exact same architecture, which dated back to the Gamecube, and in order to keep power use to a minimum they kept its clocks quite low.

If they clocked the WiiU CPU to around 2.4Ghz, it would have been faster than the Xbox 360 tri-core 3.2Ghz CPU, the in-order-design and lots of cache would have helped tremendously in bolstering IPC.

Still, in saying that... Having such a conservative CPU has meant that porting games to Switch has been a super easy affair, because those ARM cores are far more capable.

Yeah, the more CPU-taxing Wii U games like (I assume) BOTW and Hyrule Warriors do run a lot better on Switch. 

What is it that makes the A57s in the Switch better than Espresso, the fact that it's 64-bit versus 32-bit plus superscalar parallelism?

Last edited by curl-6 - on 03 January 2020