The power of 4.5 GameCube's!

It would make no sense for them to alot a full 512 MB of RAM to the OS. No console OS needs that much RAM unless they're doing something hideously wasteful. 128 would be fine.

There are rumors going around that Nintendo is doing something unique with the OS, plus devs are saying this too (can't remember who though). Thursday is going to be one hell of a day.

Being able to pop out of the game and use the web, make a video call could require a good deal of RAM no?

What if the system can also record live TV or something (it already has TV remote functionality) while allowing for gameplay. Shrugs.

Seems to fall in line with most rumors, I have read a few sources that have suggested that the CPU will contain enhanced Broadway cores, but I was assuming that it was going to be 1 Power 7 core and 2 Broadway cores which would help with backwards compatibility. Which would explain why the last spec sheet had a weird CPU spec where the CPU had 3 cores but one of them had a lot more cache than the other 2.

A lot of rumors have suggested that final hardware would have 1.5GB of RAM with ~512MB of RAM reserved for the system. This makes sense if they want to offer some multitasking capabilities, such as that ability to bring up a web browser on the Wii U tab while playing a game etc. 1GB of RAM for games is still a lot compared to what current consoles have. The PS360 both have basically 512MB of ram with a small chunk of that reserved for the system. The 32MB of EDRAM is also very good vs the 360's 10MB and should allow more 1080p (most devs will go for 720p like Nintendo tho) or games with MSAA at 720p, tho a chunk of it will be used for the second framebuffer for the tablet and if they allow 2 tablets at once they will really need that large framebuffer.

The GPU falls in line with everything we had heard about it already.

Would not be surprised if these were the real specs

IBM Watson ‏@IBMWatson
@DeSero "WiiU has 45nm custom chip ... a SOI design & packs same processor tech found in #IBMWatson" http://engt.co/l9uQLv - @engadget

I would suspect that Nintendo (or any console manufacturer) would start off over-estimating the needs of the OS and then relax requirements a couple years after release. The reason for this is that there would be huge problems if they underestimated the OS' needs.

Yeah that's been speculated too, one Power7-ish core + 2 enhanced Broadway style cores.

It seems obvious Nintendo was going for something with a little more kick to it than an XBox 360. If souping up the Broadway got them to the performance target they wanted ... really who cares. It's just a name.

If the Wii U CPU was wildly more powerful than the 360/PS3, don't you think we would've heard something about it now? Nintendo got the performance they wanted at the price they wanted. They've said themselves, they have to be able to sell the Wii U at a price affordable to kids, they're not just making something for 20-30 year old tech heads who can spend $400+.

I imagine even at this spec at $249.99 they may be losing a few dollars ($299 and $350 SKUs would be profitable most likely though).

True. Like how developers could only use 2/3rd of the PSP's clock speed for the first couple years.

Psh, what a joke, no way on earth will it be able to compete with 720/PS4... it doesn't even have blast processing.