| Soundwave said: The crazy thing is the Wii U was wildly expensive to manufacture, probably not much cheaper than the PS4 itself because Nintendo insisted on sticking with the outdated Wii architecture rather than using a more common off the shelf type CPU/GPU/RAM and the overpriced controller gimmick. |
The Ram is off the shelf. It just needed more of it, not half of it dedicated to the OS... A wider memory bus wouldn't have hurt either.
The IBM and ARM CPU cores are also a known quantity.
The only really uncommon part would be the semi-custom Radeon based on VLIW5/VLIW4.
What Nintendo should have done is made the console a higher TDP device and dialed up that 160-shader GPU to the max.
My own testing on older 40nm VLIW GPU's is that when dumped with enough voltage and enough cooling... 1,200Mhz is more than attainable reliably, that would have doubled the systems GPU performance+more, outside of fillrate limited scenarios without increasing chip size.
Heck, I once took an integrated Radeopn 3200HD (AMD 780G) that was built on the older 55nm process and took it from 500Mhz to 1,600, of course I had to strap a fan to the heatsink and increase voltages, but it did make a hell of a difference. - I was expecting it to be a suicide run, but the system lasted for years.
The cost was with all the little "accessories" that Nintendo tried to cram in.
The Wii Sensor bar, the gamepad with it's Battery+480P display+Wireless/Bluetooth connection module+other electronics/motion controls and processing equipment is what dumped on the manufacturing costs.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
