Not sure how accurate this is, but 3DS is stronger in a variety of ways even if it isn't pushing tech very far.

The PSP has 128 ppi and the 3DS has 237 ppi. As what seems to be Nintendo's calling card, releasing hardware at a marginal increase in performance as a means to provide lower cost of development, even though I'm not sure that always translates, but it atleast provides them with cheaper manufacturing costs to prevent the need to sell at a large loss....well typically.

http://www.designintouch.com/iamandroid/?p=85

I've found two sources, one saying 2Gpixels, the other saying 1Gpixels. I'm not sure how reliable the source above is but it has loads of consoles listed. I've found alternate sources for half of the consoles on that list and they seem to check out, including the PS2 which apparently has a 2.4Gpixel fill rate.

Maybe that isn't a reliable to compare GPUs either (better than clock speed though). Any PC experts know the best way to compare GPU power? FLOPs?

The 3DS has a 2-core 2010 CPU, while the Wii has a 1-core 2005 CPU.

Does this help you get some idea of the architecture?

It's hard to find the 3DS GFLOPs. But it definitely has more Shader Cores.

People use to say the 3DS GPU is 200 MHz with 15.3 million polygons, but now everyone says its 400 MHz with 30.6 million polygons.

Cleary we are still learning of the 3DS polygon count & GFLOPs & so fort.

The funny thing is at I have been telling everyone about the 3DS GPU being clocked at 400 MHz since 2011 or 2012, thanks to someone on Yahoo Answers buying an extra one and taking it apart to test the tech.

I can post the Link for you to read his post.

EDIT:

Here is the link I found when looking for specs on google. This guy took one apart:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Av9zpnSuCiVxCKxgc.NxwIPsy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20120122070542AA1qUa3

The difference in years between the CPUs is easily countered by the 3DS's constraints in size, power use, and heat.

And no, the year and number of cores doesn't give a good idea of the archiecture, for that we need to know things like cache sizes, pipeline lengths, bandwidth between components, IPC, (Instructions Per Cycle) etc.

The difference in years between the CPUs is easily countered by the 3DS's constraints in size, power use, and heat.

And no, the year and number of cores doesn't give a good idea of the archiecture, for that we need to know things like cache sizes, pipeline lengths, bandwidth between components, IPC, (Instructions Per Cycle) etc.

That's because every Wii U game so far is either (A) a (mostly lazily done) 360 port, or (B) not graphically ambitious. People act as if these are an accurate demonstration of the system's power, and that it's somehow already maxed out, which is ridiculous. There's not a single game so far that's made by a technically talented team, from the ground up, to be graphically intensive, so nothing we've seen so far is indicative of the console's full capabilities. The Wii took a while to differentiate itself from the Gamecube graphically since early  games were lazy, the same situation is  repeating itself here.

Also, the fact that one is a PowerPC and the other an old ARM processor pretty much tells us everything we need to know. Only in the Cortex-A9 series ARM managed to get similar power to a first-gen Intel Atom processor, which, in turn, had comparable performance to a 900MHz Celeron M, which has similar power to the PowerPC processor found on the Wii. ARM11 came way before the release of Cortex-A9 processors, therefore, it's much, much slower than the Hollywood processor inside the Wii, even if it runs at a higher clockspeed. In fact, it's probably even slower than the GameCube processor. ARM only started to significantly improve performance on CPU cores after the release of the Cortex-A8.

no one ever said it was maxed out. NO ONE. All those consoles I mentioned werent maxed out at launch and they still had games that looked significantly better than the gen prior, so whats Wii U's excuse? And no graphical instensive? Please, Zombi U, Rayman, Lego, all those games could be on WIi. Your right about the WIi, and its going to be a similar situation, it will STILL be a gen behind power wise than the comp. And there isnt anything released on WIi that could not have been done on GC so it still didnt differ itself too much in the end. 

You don't know what you are talking about. Metroid Prime 3, the Wii COD games from World at War onwards, and Xenoblade couldn't be done on Gamecube, for a start. 

And people imply Wii U is maxed out all the time by claiming current games (lazy ports made on crappy devkits) already show its limits. When people judge Wii U's graphics, they conveniently ignore the fact that consoles improve visually over time. We're not talking about clear gaps at launch, we're talking about the common knowledge that launch games don't show a system's full capacity.

RAM =/= power. GPU-wise 3DS has shown to be quite powerful and I don't think the gap is that high in this specific matter, considering Resident Evil Revelations, one of the most impressive 3DS titles graphically-wise, is rendered at 800x480 if running in 2D mode(thanks to FSAA) while looking similar to Vita's best. Uncharted Vita, for example, is rendered at 720x408. CPU wise it's an entirely different matter, though, since 3DS's clockspeeds are not known and Vita's CPU uses a new architecture when compared to 3DS's.