Interesting decision to pack everything into a MCM "no matter what". It sounds like console size was an important factor decided in early development. It is more than a little worrying to see everything crammed tightly into such a tiny case, though. Still, I want to believe that Nintendo took reliability very seriously.

It's going to be a hot little box, and failure rates will almost certainly go up from the Wii, but Nintendo has a good track record.

I remain somewhat concerned about that CPU and the GPU-focused design. This could ultimately be a bottleneck when the next generation kicks into full-gear. I hope they ran this design by major third-party developers during development.

I don't think you understand what consistent throughput means ... Using made up numbers and a simple benchmark, there are two approaches that can be taken:

1) Develop a system for peak theoritical performance; while the system can render 240 million polygons per second at peak it regularly runs into a bottleneck that drops performance down to 120 million polygons per second.

2) Develop a system for consistent performance; the system can produce 120 million polygons per second for all games.

This has nothing to do with how well utilized the performance is by developers. In general the more consistent the performance is the better able developers are to be able to enhance visuals over time because they know exactly what the system can do and work around it; while peak theoritical performance usually results in developers struggling to get a steady frame-rate with the visuals they produced.

You should see the internals of the Wii and GC.  I've taken both of them apart to fix for neighbors and friends.   This doesn't look any more tightly packed together than those 2 were.

This is three times the heat output of the Wii, though.  That's the part that makes the design very, very important.  Still, like I said, I think Nintendo takes build quality personally.  RRoD situations are very unlikely.  I do think failure rates will definitely go up from the Wii, though, probably to around PS3 levels.

I think developing for the Wii U will be easy once developers work out how best to use the GPU's dominant position, but I think porting/optimizing to the Wii U is going to be something of a chore.  We've already seen one developer say as much with a game developed on the PS3.  

the technology on  ps3 is 6 year old, problem porting games to the wii U is because  that games are made for hardware very different to the tech packed in  (wii U).

They intentionally designed the Wii U system itself not to stand out. Instead, the focus will be on the GamePad.


Don't like this...