What should Nintendo have done instead of Wii U?

[Pemalite]

JWeinCom said:

The X-Box 360 had roughly 5 times as much Ram as the Wii, which is important if you're loading HD textures.  It's power consumption was approximately 1/10 of the XBox 360's 2009 model which would indicate significantly less need for cooling.  The 360's processor had 3 cores and ran at about 5 times the speed in addition to having other advantages.  Its memory bandwith was about 1/7 of the 360.  The Wii doesn't support HDMI output.  The Wii itself is less than half the size of even the smaller 360 models.

To be clear, are you suggesting that Nintendo could have gotten the Wii anywhere close to the threshold for HD while lowering power consumption cooling requirements and costs?  

The Wii was running HD textures. Some 360 games had 4k textures. (4096x4096)
Texture resolution is independent of the display output resolution.

The Original Xbox was running at HD resolutions for many games, the Wii was a similar ballpark in terms of overall capability.

What I am getting at... Is that fabricating old, large chips isn't always cheaper... Companies like to retool their fabs to newer process nodes, while doing so... There tends to be less fabs on older process nodes, those older nodes tend to get used for specialized chips/controllers for specialized markets and thus get charged a premium. - Thus building a console chip on antiquated and old nodes can actually start to increase in costs while that node is being depreciated.

Same thing goes for RAM, Ram is is a commodity and thus suffers the wrath of market forces like supply/demand.. Thus after a DRAM  technology has hit full market saturation, it tends to be at it's lowest price point, from there as other markets shift to newer DRAM technologies, supply switches to the newer DRAM and older DRAM technologies tend to go up in price as manufacturing for it stops. - Consoles don't tend to make any changes on the Ram front.

Ergo, older hardware isn't necessarily always cheaper or more cost effective than newer, faster hardware.

Right now, I can guarantee a Raspberry Pi is not only faster than the Wii, but would end up being cheaper to manufacture for example.