Lol what good is having even 1000x more RAM if you can't ever use it. As a developer you would be more concerned with the speed than anything else. What good is having a 16 lane freeway when the speedlimit is only 35mph. I'd rather have a 4 lane highway running @ 70 mph so you can get all those cars home faster.

Lets review the Wii U's system specs vs PS3/Xbox 360:

• 50% slower RAM (12.8gbps vs 25.6gbps for PS3)
• While Wii U has 2GB of RAM Nintendo reserves a full 1GB of that for System resources. That 50% wow. (PS3 was always lamented by developers for reserving 19% of RAM). So in reality developers only have ~2.4x more RAM not 4x as you claim and its slower.
• 50% slower CPU. This is being really generous here. The Wii U is 32-bit. Has a clockrate of 1.24ghz. And is based on the IBM PowerPC 750 (1997). 32-bit architectures started going out in the late 90's/very early 2000's. Even comparing the clock speeds is bad (1.24 vs 3.6) because the Wii U can't do as much per CPU cycle due to being only 32-bit. GIgaflops paints even worse picture: (3.72 gigaflops Wii U vs 10.8 gigaflops Xbox 360 vs 23.04 gigaflops PS3).
• GPU is next...

Even Wii U CPU is weak on paper, if its used on right way (use of huge and very fast EDRAM section and the big CPU caches in the cores) it can punche well above own height, just look how Nintendo used it for its game, most of Nintendo games working 720p/60Fps. Shin'en wrote how to use most of Wii U CPU and whole hardware.

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2013/05/shinen_wii_u_has_enough_power_for_years_to_come_gpu_is_several_generations_ahead_of_current_consoles

So no, Wii U CPU is not 50% weaker than PS3/Xbox360. About GPU, its not just about power, Wii U GPU is several generations newer GPU than Xbox360/PS3 and that "allows many things that were not possible on PS3/Xbox360 consoles".

At end we have: somehow slower CPU and RAM but stronger and much more modern GPU and 2.4x more RAM. So similar performance like Xbox 360/PS3, but if hardware is used on right way it can have pretty impressive results for that hardware.

Nintendo made great hardware in Wii U for what they were aiming, very efficient, small, silent and in same time very capable 720p console, even if we know that aim wasn't good decision. I don't think they will use same philosophy this time again.

Anybody else sick of NX rumors? Come on people, give it a break. Wait for something even REMOTELY official.

I find it odd people keep saying this then turn around and complain when the forums have little activity, NX rumours like it or not are keeping the activity on the board constant.

Only when I don't like what I hear or read.  Then I comfort myself by saying that they're just baseless rumors.

You have to factor in with the wii u that it has more memory but its lower memory bandwidth so to fill that 2GB of memory takes much, much longer than 512MB on 360 or the two 256MB banks on ps3 are quicker again. However both 360 and wii u have additional very fast memory, 10MB on 360 and 32MB on wii u. No hard drive as standard on wii u either and if you connect one externally its bottlenecked by a slow usb2.0 interface.

Also its pretty much confirmed that the wii u main gpu is 176gflops not 352gflops plus it has the additional wii gpu which may operate in a turbo mode as the  gamepad's graphic engine. Still admittedly the wii u's gpu is still more powerful than 360 and ps3 due to its later architecture. It just does many things much more efficiently and relies less on other resources like the cpu's.

The wii u is a seriously weak console which doesn't quite manage to match 360 and ps3 for  most games.

However I'm really hopeful Nintendo will make the NX far more competitive. I think they realise now the game is up, shit hardware at inflated prices just won't cut it and I think they'll bring something to market with very decent cpu performance for a console and competitive gpu performance plus perhaps a few new innovations.

I'm not expecting great third party support I'm just hopeing for amazing Nintendo first party games using this much more capable hardware.

I really hope they get it right this time as anything less may mean an exit from home console hardware. Luckily AMD are doing some amazing gpu and cpu tech at the moment and the 16nm fabrication process is a possibility so a cheap powerful console with low power requirements is definitely possible. Both ps4 and xbone are very weak with regards cpu performance and 

Regarding the more modern feature set, I remember Black Forest Games talking about how Wii U's GPU, Latte, has DX11 level features like geometry shaders. Also, it's a GPGPU, and having access to 32MB of Embedded DRAM (that's over three times more than 360) would be a big help. Shin'en in particular talked a lot about how useful the eDRAM to pushing graphics in their games.

It may not be a big leap over PS3/360, but it's definitely more capable.

Can't believe the "wii u is only weak on paper" claim. lol kinda sounds suspiciously familiar to the "PS4 is only powerful on paper" routine i always used to see.

Also if i were you I'd refrain from going to places with nintendo in their URL they tend to be biased and spout lies favoring nintendo. Some of those places even claimed the Wii U having memory bandwidth rivaling that of the PS4/xbone and quite obviously thats not even close to being true.

I didn't mention the Wii U's edram because its basically just the same thing the Xbox 360 has only more of it. Edram is only used in a handfull of operations with most having to do with image post-processing. Besides the Wii U edram is embedded on the CPU not the GPU where it should have been. So the technical advantages of the Wii U having edram are rather limited and not worth discussing here.

As for the Wii U gpu having new hardware features: Yes of course it would. The GPU is basically off the shelf , a slighty downclocked AMD/ATI Mobility HD 4650 variant. So yes it has unified shaders that the ps3/xbox 360 lack. But having some new hardware features is only useful if it is exposed properly through a software API. Nintendo would have to do that. With the Wii developers complained about not having access to programmable shaders even though the Wii gpu supported GPU shaders. This is because Nintendo decided not to expose those features in the Wii API even though they could have. Same thing happend with the Wii U.

And what's with the "somehow" slower CPU and memory. It is not "somehow" it is mathematically proven, the numbers don't lie. I even ignored the fact that the Wii U has a 32-bit CPU, lower clock speed, older design, etc. The Wii U cpu comes from a design that competed against the Intel Pentium 2. The memory the Wii U has is a function of its slower CPU and 32-bit architecture. The WII U's system ram could actually be about 55gbps but is limited by the CPU's low GHZ rating (which controls the system bus) and 32-bit word size (which controls how much data can be moved around at one time).

I hate to tell you this but you've been misinformed. Geometry shaders are not a DirectX 11 level feature and the Wii U GPU does not have the hardware to support DX11 and the GPU does not have direct access to the edram.

• Geometry shaders have been possible on many DirectX versions and OpenGL. You can do these shaders as far back as DX9. So geometry shaders prove nothing besides DX 9-11 level hardware support.
• The Wii  U GPU comes froma reference design that only has upto DirectX 10.1 feature level hardware. It lacks the needed hardware to ever support features exclusive to DX11/ newer OpenGL.
• GPGPU is just a term that stands for general purpose GPU applications. It is not new or exclusive to the Wii U gpu and both the PS3 and Xbox 360 support that. It is simply about running code originally meant for the CPU and adapting it to the GPU. They had GPGPU even before the PS3/Xbox 360 launched.
• The 32mb of EDRAM is embedded on the CPU not the GPU on the Wii U. This means that the GPU can never directly access the EDRAM iwthout first doing through the system bus and querying the CPU. This adds latency and computational costs that would quickly destroy any advantage of using the edram by the GPU. Nintendo should have put the EDRAM on the GPU not the CPU.
• Shin'en is not a particularly good example for developers praising the Wii U's system architecture. They are pretty much exclusive to Nintendo and have no real experience outside of Nintendo products. They haven't even released any full retail Wii U titles yet. So they can be classed as a sceond party indie developer.

If this is true, that means the NX's CPU won't actually be that much better than the PS4/XBO's, as he already exaggerated the difference between the PS4 and XBO CPUs. XBO only has a slight advantage due to a slightly higher clock. Though, I have read conflicting things on this. Ubisoft ran a test and came to the conclusion the XBO was slightly better, but I have also seen a site do their own test and conclude the PS4 performs slightly better. Either way, it's basically a wash and means nothing, as games still perform better on the PS4, since it has a much better GPU.

So, if the NX has a better CPU, but a weaker GPU than the PS4, it's not really going to improve Nintendo's situation. Even one that is on par with the PS4 isn't going to help. I think the NX is going to have to have a GPU that is at least 2x as powerful as the PS4 to even interest core gamers who aren't Nintendo diehards. But, after the Wii U's lack of success, chip manufacturers aren't going to be willing to make the cheapest deals with Nintendo, and considering Nintendo is going with another expensive controller, I don't see them going that powerful and keeping the price below $399. And I think Nintendo wants to aim for a $299-$349 price.

And like I have said countless times, this still isn't going to help them against a PS5, which will be 4x-5x more powerful than the PS4.