That's annoying. lol

Guys, concentrate a bit with me now. Please observe Nintendo's recent pattern:

* Nintendo 3DS - According to the Iwata Asks interview, the project started development in 2006. The system contains a good 2006 GPU, the PICA200, and a relatively weak CPU, an ARM11 MPCore.

* Wii U - According to the Iwata Asks interview, the project started development in 2008. The system contains a good 2008 GPU, the GX2 based on the HD4000 series, and a relatively weak CPU, a custom PowerPC 7xx.

See any resemblance? Nintendo likes their systems to be GPU-centric and chooses their GPU right at the start of development, which tend to be after 1.5-2 years after the predecessor has launched. Now Nintendo is perfectly aware that $250 might be a litlle too much for today's handheld gaming standards, so they'll probably opt for a $199 price tag, given the 3DS XL's current success.

Now all we have to do is find a good 2013 mobile GPU, some ARM CPU, all while keeping the cost below $199, and voila, the next Nintendo handheld is in our han.. heads.

Hmm you might be right, I hope that's not the case since this year seems to be the year where mobile chips seem to really start taking off.

PS: It might also be an APU for the matter, shared between both home and handheld systems.

Given Iwata's recent comment that they're going to absorve the Wii U architecture completly, it sounds like they already have a pretty good plan on what they want for they're next systems. He said this in early 2014, so in 2013 they should already have decided on that (which fits my "prediction"). It's always exciting to speculated, just remmeber that Nintendo likes to keep costs down and profits up, so be careful not to get too ambitious.

I don't know that it's necessarily the case that they've already decided on the exact specs, etc. but I think even a decent APU can be pretty cheap.

It looks like the Qualcomm 800 is somewhere around 100 gigaflops to 130, so there's that.

Me neither, I just think that they should have their partners and architecture decided at this point. BTW, take a look at this APU from AMD:

Kabini & Temash (low power)   
May 2013
28nm
Jaguar CPU
Graphics Core Next GPU
2 displays max.

Pretty interesting. And it's the same base one used on PS4.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/156552-amds-last-and-only-hope-low-power-kabini-temash-are-ready-for-action

Why on earth would Nintendo want to make the new Nintendo handheld absorb the WII U's architecture ?

I say drop it cause IBM does jack shit to the micro architecture to improve upon it. Why would Nintendo want to go through the trouble of getting backwards compatibility with the WII U ?! People here need to get with the program that it becomes more of a liability since it would require Nintendo to use additional die space to integrate the IBM espresso on the SoC and that raises the baseline of the manufacturing costs.

They said that themselves. Although I think they might be referring to software and engines more than hardware, not sure though.