It depends on what you mean by "efficient". They all feature the same process nodes but the difference lies in their architectures are pretty different. Some newer architectures can extract more performance due to their more modernized design. The general concensus that viktor is trying to demonstrate that a processor with a higher power consumption is generally faster than the processor with a lower power consumption. This is assuming that the processors aren't too dissimilar such as a comparison between a cpu and gpu. Technology does become efficient over time but all of these consoles feature similar manufacturing but the wii u is efficient through it's architecture despite the fact that it has a lower theoretical floating point performance. The wii u as you can see doesn't take up alot of power compared to the hd twins this generation but that doesn't automatically mean it's weak that it's like pemalite and nylevia had stated. 

Alot of people here are forgetting about the WII Us modernized architecture to obtain a better result. The wii u has better rendering techniques than the ps360 so it can afford to spend less cycles on processing alot of things.

It boils down to this, the wii u can achieve more with less.

Chip designs get more efficient over time, but engineers are not wizards. Especially when it comes to GPUs, where things are highly paralellized. You can improve a design and gain maybe 15% performance under the same thermal ceiling. You can't ever get 100%. Ever seen a 100W AMD card beat a 200W nVidia card? When both cards are in the same proccess node, it cannot happen. Also consider that the GPUs from all 3 current gen consoles, come from the same fab(TSMC).

It is not 40:100, because the Wii U is a newer and probably more efficient design, but its not 1:1 either. Efficiency in chip design has its limits. AMD, which happens to be the GPU supplier of all these systems -current and next gen- except the PS3, has been releasing revisions of their APU(Llano, Trinity, Richland) on the same 32nm process node from Global Foundries. They have beein doing so for the past 3 years and guess what, performance gains every year are minimal at best.

You are right about the performance gains being miminal if there are any at all LOL. Since amd is manufacturing their new apus on 28nm how much perfirmance gains will there be ? (I'm willing to bet not a whole lot but all I can do is hope that hUMA can have a big impact.) 

Off-topic: You sound pretty educated on the topic of chip fabrication and you also sound like you know something about chip design too.

A 40 Watt console in its first year keeping up with 100 of consoles with 7-8 years of developer optimization on their side doesn't seem like a minimal gain to me. Even to gain even performance, (which I don't consider it to be, as I see Wii U's GPU as almost certainly being stronger) that's a 150% increase in efficiency for the 40 Watt console.

The newer DX10/11 features and many times larger eDRAM will help it a lot.

not really true because smartphones are approaching ps3 power and they draw like a watt or two.

i am very certain even a ps360 manufactored on 28nm couldn't approach that.

mind you, i believe the wii u is quite weak. just correcting you.

Not even close!

Well since 28nm is a half node step, there will be some gains. I hope that Steamroller CPU will finally fix the IPC problem of AMD's module design. Also if I am not wrong, the next batch will be made at TSMC, since AMD had lots of trouble with Glodbal Foundries yields.

I might happen to have some some academic background in this stuff, but to be honest, all you need to do is spend some time on sites like Tomshardware and Anandtech and you'll know a lot more than  what you'll learn in college in a year, generally speaking.

Dv8thwonder said: Mummelmann said: I've never seen people get so angry about GFLOPS. I remember when gaming was about games.

Touchè young one. I still don't get angry over GFLOPS though. Maybe because I know I'll always have more anyway!

So an unnamed "dev" makes several claims with nothing to support it and some people accept every word he says as absolute fact.

Then we get actual developers with their actual names and reputations and they contradict the anonymous "dev" and people just want to bring up vagueness, thermal designs and ignore the fact the "dev" was wrong.

I see.