Whatever "absorbing the Wii U architecture" implies, that's how they'll do it.

But they definitely are keeping BC. That's core to the unified platform.

EDIT: To clarify, I'm only talking about digital BC. Every game available on the eshop now will be playable on the NX at launch. I don't know, nor do I care about physical BC. Don't know if Nintendo does either, considering how they've been pushing digital this past generation so hard.

i think they will drop BC.

To play wii U games players will have to have a gamepad, in other words, they will probably will have to have a wii U.
Unless nintendo start selling gamepads...

Well, they did say they wanted the new hardware to 'absorb' the WiiUs. Whatever that means. It could be a pointer to backwards compatibility though.

I don't know if that's possible, but could they be working on some sort of x86 PPC hybrid? I mean, the ds basically had a GBA inside it too right? Were those two based on the same archetechture though? And, for example could they run the operating system on the WiiU part of the cosole and the new games on the x86 part? Would that even be easier to code for in the end?

Sorry I sort of came in here equipped only with questions instead of answers.

The DS has an identical GBA ARM7 chip that acted as a sound processor when running DS games. Plus the DS's main processors were ARM9.

Same way as VC is done; with software.

The WiiU is not an uber powerful system and I believe they will have a software based solution to simulate WiiU capabilities. Hell, WiiU hardware is already largely on a single chip. Surely that can be refined to allow even hardware solution at a meager cost.

Ok, thanks!

So, I guess short of them using PPC architechture again, they wont really be able to physicly provide BC then?

If they put a less energy-hungry version of the Wii U's CPU on the motherboard as a secondary processor (responsible for sound or background processes), but that would certainly increase manufacturing costs and hardware R&D. Also I'm not familiar with how micro-architectures work and whether or not this would make programming harder. I would think there would be an inefficiency because the code would have to be interpreted between processes, but if it is a secondary processor maybe it isn't a huge concern other than limiting bandwidth.  

Software emulation or bust.

If there's gamepad support(and hopefully it sells separately) it should be fairly easy for NX to run 3DS games. They'll go ARM for all consoles.