Apple's A-series processors have outperformed the Wii-U for some time. The 3rd Generation iPad in 2012 matched the PS3 on performance. Because the Wii-U is on par with the X360 and PS3 the mobile devices have been ahead for some time now.

It gets worse for Nintendo when you consider the slow and clunky processor in the Wii-U. The Wii-U has in it a triple core G3 processor (nearly unchanged since 1998) clocked at 1.2ghz per core running 32-bit code. The A7 in the iPhone 5S is dual 1.4ghz 64-bit cores. In single threaded applications (games) this outperforms the ancient PowerPC by a long way. In multithreaded applications (operating system services) it matches if not exceeds performance.

There's also the question of heat and clock speed. The Wii-U's processor requires a cooling system (heatsink and fans) while the A-series can run without one by underclocking. If you attached a cooling system to the A7 you could possibly (in theory) push it to nearly 2ghz. Additionally the A-series have a 64-bit address bus (meaning in theory it can support more than 4gb RAM + ROM) while the G3 is only 32-bit (Maximum 4GB RAM + ROM). It's one reason why the Wii-U had no more than 2gb RAM - with the other half of the address bus dedicated to ROM and I/O they couldn't add any more memory to it.

They can. Apple has low-level API's.

That's because of dedicated fixed function hardware, not necesarrily GPU or CPU grunt.
Fixed function hardware is inherintly more efficient and faster per-transister than other methods, which is why mobile relies far more heavily upon it.

There is more to performance than floating point arithmatic.
A 2 Teraflop GPU could be slower than a 1 Teraflop GPU.

Keep in mind that Mobile GPU's tend to render games differently than console or PC GPU's, they tend to go with tiled-based approaches due to their efficiency and power consumption edge.

Bandwidth isn't half of the equation.

For one, you have compression both on the software side and hardware side to mitigate that.

Secondly... The Xbox One has less compute resources than the Playstation 4, thus by extension it's bandwidth requirements will also be lower.
The Xbox One will also heavily rely on a variation of tiled-based rendering due to the esram, much like the Xbox 360, which means bandwidth efficiency gains.
The PC and PS4 will likely brute-force, because they can.

Take a look at AMD's Fury GPU, despite the fact it has orders of magnitude more bandwidth than nVidia's Titan... All that extra bandwidth essentially meant nothing at the end of the day.

Not exactly.

You cannot do an Apple's to Apple's comparison... (See the pun?) Because Apple uses ARM. Microsoft uses x86. Apple typically uses PowerVR for the GPU and Microsoft uses AMD. CISC vs RISC. Tiled Based Rendering vs Immediate-mode rendering.

Both have different degree's of fixed function and programmable hardware capabilities and performance and efficiency.

Indeed.
Mostly because Intel has picked most of the exciting performance/watt pieces of low hanging fruit and AMD hasn't been competitive.

To put it all in perspective though... Intel was able to scale down Intel Atom (Medfield) so that a Single Core Intel Atom was able to beat two ARM Cortex A9 Cores.
The successor to that was able to play with the iPhone 5s. - Which the iPhone 6 is a good 10-25% faster.

AMD's Jaguar is faster than Intel's Atom on a core-to-core, clock-to-clock basis by a fairly chunky amount at the expense of consuming a bit more energy... And it has allot more of those cores.
So it's easy to see that the 8-core chips in the consoles still have an edge, even if only 6 are used for gaming...

I still wish that console manufacturers would take CPU performance seriously for once though.

You mean Power7 with it's own twist, rather than merely "G3" clone with higher clocks, there has been multiple changes to the die in order to be fabricated at 45nm with it's much higher clocks.

Also, you can have 32bit and greater memory amounts of 4Gb.
You have PAE which can extend boost it to 36bit(Or more!)/64Gb of Ram on Windows Machines, even with a 32bit processor.

The 32-bit version of Windows Server 2003 for example can have 128Gb of Ram.

Besides, the limit isn't actually a Ram limit, it's an address space limit, there is a substantual difference.

So it is better than half of the strength of PS4? Doubtful. In both cases.

I remember you! The guy who was all like "Tegra X1 is 1 TFLOPS" and then proceeded to be disproved because that was half-precision floating points. And that was without even factoring in power throttling and the way GPU makers like Imagination Technologies lag way behind AMD and Nvidia when comparing FLOPS to FLOPS.

Even at 16nm it is doubtful we can squeeze more than, say, 64 GFLOPS (AMD FLOPS) per Watt, and in average an iPad is designed to dissipate about 2.5-3 Watts (given their battery capacity and battery life). So no again.

But try once more when we get to 10 nm or so, by all means. One day we'll get there.

Oh, you already cleaned the thread up. Good.

Thanks for the explanations. But about gaming, how does it go for making ports of console games to run on apple devices ? Are there any particular challenges programming wise?

So something that cost $800 is more powerful than a $300 console that is three years old? Ok. They said it is close to desktop levels so I would hope so. If it was not Apple is just screwing over its customers again.

Bayonetta 2 has better graphics than anything will run on this cpu

bayo 2 wouldnt even run on a xbone. they used dark magic or so to make the game run on the wiiu.

Most game engines support all major paltforms, mobile included at a technical level, so should be trivial.

iOS actually has a low-level API called "Metal" which has allot of the same stuff that OpenGL and Open CL has and was built and modified from the OpenGL code base.
So for a developer, the development environment isn't that much different from a Playstation 4.

I try my best. :) Missed me? :P

Nothing is ever close to PC Desktop levels of performance. Why? The law of Physics literally comes into play.

For one... You have larger chips with higher clocks which need to be fed with substantual amounts of energy, waste energy is then transformed into heat energy, size and space allows for better cooling systems to remove that heat energy.

You also have the space to have multiple of everything.