Ninty should have kept Wii alive and kicking two more years and released Wii U this year (that is it should have kept Wii healthy until Wii U release instead of killing it one year too early), although still possibly before the others, for example this September, so chip production refinement and more time to design cooling systems and air flow could have avoided any overheating problem without having to downgrade any part. Moreover it should have used faster RAM, so allowing to use at their full potential even slower CPU and GPU than the competition and making the real gap from the rest of 8th gen a lot smaller and the real leap from 7th gen "HD twins" a lot larger. Finally, fitting Wii U with 4GB RAM instead of 2GB could have avoided the vast majority of future porting problems from other platforms (for example any problems porting games available also for 32bit Windows would have become inexistent).

IPC is a lot better than PS3 and 360 though.

Xbox's advantage over PS2 is actually similar to Wii U's over PS3/360; twice as much RAM and a newer GPU feature set making up for a CPU with less raw power.

The IPC is actually worse.  

5 gflops per core at 1.2ghz is pretty bad but you shouldn't be depending too much on the CPU to help with rendering because all of the newer consoles are GPU accentric and CPUs rarely do anything for rendering if any at all. 

Marcan, the hacker who stripped down Wii U and first revealed it's clock speeds and architecture, stated that Espresso, Wii U's CPU, should "win big on IPC on most code" compared to the less efficient CPUs of PS3/360.

Espresso may be lower clocked than its rivals but it has far more cache, a shorter pipeline less affected by performance robbing bubbles, out of order execution, and a DSP for offloading the audio workload. 

Oh I had meant IPC in terms of Flops not IPC in terms of other things such as integer etc etc but yeah it's out of order design really helps out to geet the most of it's power and the cache will reduce performance hits but I'd rather push aside the ibm espresso and let the latte graphics chip do the talking. 

Fair enough.

I guess it's just that with Espresso I at least know what I'm talking about, while Latte is still so nebulous, haha.

Well it's not your fault. Most people couldn't even begin to understand how a GPU works other than the mantra that the GPU is known to be massively parallel. After all they are the ones with the shit ton of transistors so it's only fair that they would have the most complexity involved in them. You have to account for things such as concurrency or how scalable a workload is for a GPU. You even have to know what types of rendering methods they and what drawbacks that it will pose. There are many parts to a GPUs performance such as functional units like shaders, ROPS, TMUs, and even bandwidth as well as memory. Oh and that's just the surface of things! CPUs have not become very complex in their design because they benefit more from serial based workloads and the laws of physics prevents them from going into higher frequencies so chip designers altogether except for intel stopped trying to make to make significantly more powerful and even then intel only does incremental boosts to their CPU performance, not the 20% like we used to get back in the day with a new process node! I can't even begin to start programming for GPUs yet even though microsoft made it easier with the C++ AMP library because it's still too hard for me!

Early ports were troublesome because of the CPU, not GPU.  Games developed on the PS3 or X360 are done so with game engines designed around a 3.2 Ghz clock rate.   The Wii U's CPU is just 1.24 Ghz.  The game engines themselves had problems on Wii U early on.   Notice that it's not such as issue with newer games as they've either began to use their next generation game engine (which is based on much lower clock cycles of the PS4 and XOne) or have learned better optimization of the older gen engine on Wii U.

Don't forget that the Wii U also pushes an extra 400,000 pixels over the X360 and PS3 with each game.  That's almost half of a 720p image right there on top of the game itself.

Clock rates don't mean a whole lot and they don't tell the full story! All that matters is that whether or not the CPU has enough performance. You know this! The ibm espresso has nothing more to offer other than more performance compared to the ibm broadway. It's architecture remains largely unchanged since the ibm gekko days. Essentially what the WII U has is basically a scaled up gamecube processor. Nintendo was dumb enough to settle backwards compatiblity rather than just move forward and be done with a more improved architecture. *rolls eyes* I don't recall any devs having issues with the CPU in fact the only one I can remember complaining was 4A Games. The next generation game engines only have improvements on multithreading.

I also realize that some resources are being hogged by the gamepad. Nontheless CPUs in the coming generation will mostly be a nonfactor. I still standby that the wii u can achieve more with less! (I'm sure pretty technical like pemalite would stand by my statement even though he dislikes all consoles equally. ) 

I think we've had enough of saying that the wii u is weak just by looking at the specs. Nylevia would most likely agree that the WII U can also get a better output than the sub hd twins. 

No, deal with it.

OK, I don't think you understood my point with that Mobility radeon 5650 idea. I didn't say that was what Wii U was using, I simply pointed out that it would be possible for Wii U to still retain the 33-36Watts it uses, while also having more than 160 shaders, because you seemed to have the idea that it couldn't have more shaders because it only ran at 35W (based on your previous posts). Again, I'm NOT saying that it has anything like the 5650, just that more than 160 shaders with total system wattage like that wouldn't violate the laws of physics in any way (if it were designed with those GPU specs)

Well, if Latte is 40nm, and if its total die size is 156.21mm² (those measurements are pretty accurate with two decimal places), and we know it uses AMD Radeon technology, and the 40nm cards seem to average around 6 - 6.25 million transistors per squared millimeter, then we could use simple arithmetic, and easily calculate the transistor count:

156.21 millimeter squared x 6,000,000 (million transistors / millimeter squared) = minimum 937,260,000 transistors for all of the Latte die (including the eDRAM). eDRAM is roughly 220 million transistors for 32MB 40nm Renesas eDRAM, so GPU logic for Latte is:

937 million (total die) - 220 million (eDRAM) = 717,260,000 (estimate) minimum transistors for pure GPU logic. "Logic" includes everything like Shaders, Texture mapping units, GPRs, Tessellator, etc. I cannot explain why it has so much GPU logic considering the alleged specs, but you should know that there's more to a GPU than simply Shaders, Texture Mapping Units and ROPs (they could have modified the shaders, TMUs and ROPs to their liking). A LOT of this GPU is left unexplained by those who don't have documentation. We don't know how Nintendo decided to modify this GPU, and unless we have some documention to explain each block of logic on the die, we just won't know what everything does.