spemanig said:
But Sony and Microsoft don't, which causes an issue for ports, right? And they can't make x86 and PowerPC scalable? I don't think they'll drop BC for anything. The last time they did that was with the GCN. Dropping BC would go against everything they said in January.
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It doesn't really matter what Sony and MS do. If Nintendo wants a system that is scalable from handheld to console on the same architecture where it is trivial to port games between the two they will most likely not be able to compete with the next round of consoles from them anyway. And Nintendo have shown they really don't care about 3rd parties with the design of the Wii U. ARM is a widely used architecture that has lots of documentation and mature tools, the CPU architecture doesn't really make a huge difference in programming these days anyway.
Sure you can make any architecture scalable if you are willing to spend enough money. I doubt Nintendo want to spend hundreds of millions to have IBM or another PowerPC partner design a whole new generation of PowerPC CPUs just for their own uses. You have to realise that PowerPC is a dieing architeture, there isn't much of a future in it IMO. The only company that has managed to scale an X86 chip too anything even close to ARM in terms of power effeciancy is Intel and they don't license out their designs so Nintendo would have to buy chips directly from Intel at a premium and that would mean they would be able to make fewer modifications to the architecture which they like to do.
ARM is really the most logical choice for a scalable architecture that is targeting mobile and home console. with them going for a unified acount based system next gen it makes sense tohave a clean break and start over so they can easily keep BC in the future. I doubt backwards compatability with the Wii U is worth the investment given the costs involved for the gain they would get from it. They can always sell you the same stuff again as they like to do, I mean they broke backwards compatability with the gamecube for no real reason (homebrewers even managed to create a hack that lets you play the games on Wii U), and they are happy to sell remasters of those games.