Digital foundry on the Wii U architecture
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-what-is-inside-the-wii-u#comments
-The Wii U motherboard - elegant, spartan, minimalistic - and the MCM module, containing the miniscule CPU and the rather more meaty graphics core. Our impression is of a ruthlessly efficient design, with benefits for both Nintendo and consumers.
-first impressions reinforce the current position that Wii U's design is skewed towards a more feature-rich graphics core with rather more modest CPU power.
-it's worth pointing out that Nintendo appears to have integrated its 32MB of eDRAM into the graphics core itself
-adopting the MCM strategy centralises heat on the mainboard. This makes it easier to dissipate heat with a less expensive cooling assembly, and helps immensely in making the Wii U a significantly smaller unit overall than the PS3 Slim or the Xbox 360S.
-If there's one thing that's rather striking about Nintendo's Wii U teardown it's the minuscule die area occupied by the CPU in relation to the relatively massive GPU from AMD.