As far the CPU alone goes, I honestly don't know; so far all we have to go on are PS3/360 ports that aren't really suited to the architecture, and exclusives that aren't CPU-intensive.

The overall hardware I would say is better; you've got twice as much RAM, a more modern GPU, and over three times as much eDRAM.

To be fair Direct X11.1 presents its own set of new/alien technology. In the PC community the difference between the first and current generation of Direct X11 titles is already starting to show. With the big studios and budgets involved I expect a lot to happen on the console front. Resolutions and framerates may not increase dramatically but scale, lighting, shader and geometry tricks will have a significant effect on the look of games.

I'm not saying there won't be improvement, there will be, I'm just saying it won't be as dramatic as on PS3/360.

PS4 and Xbone use familiar and accessible PC-like architecture.

Both the Wii and Wii U may be giant leaps for Nintendo, but they are small steps for mankind.

Doesn't really matter.  All that matters is, can it run enough share of the best games being developed today to warrant buying.

It's not supposedly its a fact. While the wii u cpu is certainly superior on a mhz vs mhz basis the Xbox 360 has 6 threads at 3.2ghz where as the wii u cpu has 3 threads at 1.25ghz. The wii u is not even close to Xbox 360 performance. However the later gpu design of the wii u is less needy of cpu resources. The generation that followed the Xbox's gpu had a 30% increase in efficiency and the wii u gpu is perhaps a generation or so beyond that. With most wii u games struggling to match 360 and PS3 frame rates often with a 20 to 40% frame rate disadvantage this is clearly related to the cpu and unlikely to be gpu related.

Most wii u games of multiformat titles have a frame rate disadvantage and to a lesser extent a graphic disadvantage although the graphic disadvantage seems more related to earlier titles the frame rate disadvantage has actually been worse on some more recent titles like AC4, Resident Evil Revelations and a few others.

As for the main subject matter of this thread it has to be said that the original wii was released with a lower spec than the outgoing/discontinued original xbox of the time. Original xbox had a 20 gflops gpu compared to 12gflops of the wii, it had true 5.1 dolby sound compared to 2 channel sound of the wii, it had support for 1080i and 720p with some games, wii is 480p max, it has 32bit colour and an enhanced feature set over the wii's 24bit colour gpu. Not forgetting the huge advantage that the xbox had a buit in hard drive. CPU wise the wii was about the same as the Xbox's Celeron although there were advantages and  disadvantages on both sides.  It's certainly true the original xbox has a greater range of more impressive titles than wii.

Ultimately the wii u is Nintendo's late entry in providing a console of equivilant performance to 360 and PS3 unfortunately those 2 designs were a little bit more powerful in cpu terms so this puts the wii u at a disadvantage in multiformat gaming. Clearly Nintendo at the bare minimum should have provided a console that is superior to these older consoles in every area. The fact Nintendo went soo cheap not to do this is why it has failed to sell in reasonable numbers.

http://www.youtubedoubler.com/?video1=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DxLwsaPBCLDk&start1=30&video2=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dya1KF0M7w8Q&start2=500&authorName=

The lower framerates in multiplatform titles are more likely due to games being coded for the PS3/360, which have nearly a decade of dev experience and optimization on their side, then being poorly ported to the architecturally different Wii U, with which devs are not experienced.

And Wii's CPU was quite a bit better than the Xbox's; PowerPCs are well known to outperform Pentium based cores at the same clockspeed, and Wii had twice as much CPU cache to boot.

Its roughly 4-5 times more powerful than before.

The wii u is no ps3. It uses existing cpu architecture that dates back to the last century and a gpu that is well documented. Yes development software will improve but it will be marginal. This has already been stated many times how easy it is to develop for.  There is no secret sauce in the wii u its a pretty damn minimalist design. Over a year on and we are still seeing the same issues with wii u as we did at the beginning with no doubt many updates in the development software.

Gamecube did not perform as well as Xbox. I went through that period often noting how poor the Gamecube version was in comparison. Original xbox had fps games with more onscreen characters, more graphics effects, 5.1 sound,  sometimes better levels. Often Gamecube versions were cut down, partly due to low capacity of the discs but mainly due to lack of memory.

wii cpu 525 dmips at 233mhz so about 1,600 at 733mhz

xbox cpu 2000+ dmips at 600mhz or about 2,500 at 733mhz

Just for comparison;

That PS3 figure is just for the dual thread main powerpc section. Does not include the 7 spu's which in total would probably take it up to 30,000 dmips.

Yes cache and memory speed etc will make a difference but even if every variable was favourable to wii and every variable went against xbox they would only be level approximately.

The idea that the wii or wii u cpu is powerful is complete fanboy nonsense that makes no sense at all either in real world benchmarks or what the console is actually achieving.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second

Why are they showing footage of Resident Evil Revelation when talking about a graphical leap?

That game has sub-par graphics on every platform it was realesed except the 3DS. It looks like a HD-remastered 6th generation game... PS3, 360 and WiiU can all deliver a much better performance, even with multiplatform titles.

Wii U's GPU is not well documented; it has no been identified as any single pre-existing GPU.

There hasn't been improvement in third party efforts because less and less resources and effort are being invested in them due to low sales, which were partly caused by the shittiness of early ports. Besides a few like Frozenbyte and Criterion, nobody has really even tried to push the system. They just haven't bothered. You can't forcefeed a system code written for different architecture and expect it to perform well.

As for Wii/Xbox, RAM speed was also against the Xbox; CPU cycles would be lost waiting for its slower RAM to respond, and when a mistake was made, its longer pipeline meant more processing time was wasted. Xbox may look beefier on paper, but in practice it lost out due to inefficiency compared to the Wii.