Are we sure we're not talking about the wii? I've yet to see see single person compare the Wii U to the gamecube or the original wii.

When Apple switched to x86, Power PC for consumers more or less died. The development in that segment is nowhere near x86. So the architecture may have been released later, but it's still outdaded compared to todays x86 CPUs. I know that PPC is still a thing in supercomputers and is used in servers, but those are totally different beasts and not in the slightest way interesting for consoles. You can See what you get with such exotic Chips with the PS3. A whole lot of power on paper that will Never be touched by game developers.

Yup I've heard that. People saying the Wii U processor is just a reconfigured Wii processor, which was in turn simply an overclocked GameCube processor. 

Well of course, if Nintendo would have opted for a top of the line POWER8 chip, the Wii U would have curbstomped the PS4 and Xbox One in raw power and efficiancy, but the console would cost a LOT more to make.

That is exactly what they talking about, I myself included. From a gaming perspective it is dated. Every has moved on to x86, you got PS4 ONE and PC. The three biggest pies vs 1 small pie that uses something totally different.

We back in the old VHS vs Beta war. One was better but the other one won the war dude to mass support. 

Nintendo will need to go with the flow or risk falling behind further next gen.

The Power8 is the last ditch effort to keep the architecture viable. The big challenges facing it is the lack of a vibrant ecosystem, horrendous yields, and horrendous efficiency/power usage figures. Basically with Power8, IBM chose to cram as much as possible on a die (and arguably THEN some), which results in absolutely abominable yields and fairly ludicrous power/watt figures. It also doesn't perform well unless you feed it optimized code (to be fair, neither would Xeons trying to run emulated PPC code, lol).

In essence, Power8 is a jackhammer made from old melted down cannonballs when you need a sharp chisel (unless you run a datacenter which has existing infrastucture well suited and already up and running on 7+). You must remember that the Power8 is a 22nm product at 250+W TDP, lol.

If Intel desired, they could make a 250W silly chip, but this is not the 20th century any longer. Long ago the desire for efficiency and scalability came into full effect, and you can't effectively cram 250W into an appealing package for a single die product.

Knights landing and HMC will permanently exclude PPC from relevance, whether we like it or not. Products using 1/10th the power consumption of Power8 will outperform them handily, and nothing in the PPC roadmap will be operational for such a long gap in time that it presents an unsurmountable gap.

The big difference is that Intel has continually reinvested in process technology improvements and fabrication exactitude, meaning they can lead the way with PPW and yield rates. Competitors find themselves having to throw more at the wall in order to maintain performance relevance, and that costs them yield rates and efficiency. That means that the products have a hard time meeting a viable price point, they have to go through tons of wafers to find 100% dies, and then their customers get stuck with products that are much hotter and more power consuming for equal tasks.

All of this is sort of irrelevant to the WiiU though. Only the slightest relevance is there between the Power8 and the WiiU CPU, tenous to the extreme. The WiiU CPU is extremely well suited for its tasks, and at such a low clock speed makes for remarkable efficiency while still offering target performance, all while having successful high yield fabrication due to the overall simplicity and size of the product.

ARM cores may arise in the server arena, but PPC is not long for the world. The death will be slow due to clients having massive investments already in place that are hard to steer out of, but it's inevitable.

The PPW of the Xeons isn't much higher than the POWER8 chips though, the 250 Watt TDP is for the top of the line chip. That thing runs 12 cores at 5Ghz and 96 instruction sets.

In hindsight, if Nintendo could do it over again, they almost certainly would not use PowerPC for the Wii U, but it's obviously way too late to change it now.

They thought that having backwards compatibility with the Wii would help them a lot more than it has and that Wii U would sell a lot more, so they would eventually be able to scale down the cost of it even if it's a more rare type of processor these days.

In hindsight though Nintendo would probably do a lot of things differently though, they'd probably ditch the Wii brand entirely and never have gone near the tablet controller idea. 

Even Apple left it behind and it's one of the companies that created this architecture together with IBM and few others. So yes for most of purposes, videogames included it's outdated because it's a pain in the ass for developers.

but as its an old powerpc chip is in infact dated powerpc architecture..
just as an older pentium or amd chip is dated x86 architecture, because the chips lack modern features such as sse3/3.1/4 etc.