LOL, I love your math, I have no clue how close it will/won't be to true given the nature of computer growth in spurts etc...but I just got this picture of you sitting there in your house thinking "Ok, Start with a Wii, multiply times the processing power of a bag of skittles and subtract out the greens ones...then adjust for improvements to the Snicker's Reality stabalizer and we get about.....8.023x faster...but then they have to fine tune the console to get it under the amendment sony had passed in congress (you know where they strengthened witches magic) and we end up with exactly 8x faster!"...apparently my brain just decided to wander when I started reading your post =P 

Unless the some console goes for absolute power again (like PS3) i'm pretty sure that all the next-gen consoles will be around the same graphical ability. I just don't understand why people would say that it will be weaker than 360 and foolishness like that. What kind of logic are they basing that on? People are just being anti-wii instead of being pro-360/pro-ps3. The bad side of fanboyism...

Why does everyone think the wii has to be lower powered next gen too? What logic is there to support this? This is not a trend people, its probably a one time thing. By this logic the PS3 could have never existed because Sony, always having been the graphical underdog or lesser should have not been the top dog graphically this generation by your logic. Seriously, fanboy bullshit, take it too the door.

My numbers were more conceptual than anything else ... I'm not an electrical engineer and in university I never took the courses in microprocessor design so my numbers were not meant to be absolutes; we should be using a manufacturing process in the 30nm range in 2011 which (hypothetically speaking) would enable you to produce an 8-core processor where each core is as complicated as the Cell or Xenos while running your processor at a higher clock speed than either the Cell or Xenos.

I think people misinterpreted what I was saying and thought I was implying that Nintendo would make their system as powerful as was theoritically possible ... I really wasn't. I think the next Wii will be like what the XBox 360 or PS3 would be like if they were produced in 2009 but Nintendo will release it in 2011 after they have reduced the manufacturing cost and taken advantage of the extra processing power which didn't increase the cost of the system.

Edit: I'll change my prediction to be in terms of PC hardware ... The next Wii will be roughly equal to a Geforce 9800GTX SLi PC with the most powerful processor you can buy in Q4 2008.

What exactly is it that makes you think Nintendo's next console can't possibly be as powerful as the Xbox 360 and PS3? The Wii being only a bit more powerful than the last gen consoles is a concious decision, not a result of Nintendo being unable to make powerful hardware. You do realise the GC was much more powerful than the PS2 and the N64 was the most powerful machine of its generation, right?

They'll probably stay smart and avoid making an utterly unaffordable machine next gen either, but building a console slightly above the power of the current HD consoles won't be all that expensive in 2011, or whenever the next Nintendo platform comes out. 

During an interview with kotaku, Miyamoto said something interesting at the very end of the session and his translater forgot to translate it because he was too busy translating other things Miyamoto said.

What Miyamoto said was that they could quite easily make Wii compatible with High-Definition now but they probably won't until HDTV gets more popular among households. So Wii2 with High Definition is highly possible.

But generally speaking, the "more power, more faster" approach is definitely not the direction Nintendo is going to take. The president of Nintendo, Iwata, is pretty clear about this saying that this traditional business model centered around the greater power of console got "no future". He's pretty determined about it.

What he's basically saying is that Nintendo will not prioritize the "more power" strategy even though we'll see some hardware upgrades in the next console. Instead, the company will focus more on other innovations to find other "blue oceans" (cf. blue ocean strategy) because they are well aware of the fact that other companies will try to capture the emerging casual market with new intuitive interfaces, and thus will turn the current ocean into red pretty soon.

Bottom line is the next Wii won't be another XBOX360/PS3 with motion sensing controles. It's most likely going to be a surprise, or at least that's what they are going for.

I think Nintendo will follow what they did this gen by making a console for $200 and pricing it for $250. So whatever Nintendo can make at those prices will be the smart move.

But the wii is better then the xbox is some stuff but not others, i think this maybe what they do next gen. Sure the wii2 can do some stuff better but not everything. Plus the GC and 64 came out about 1 year after the Sony consoles which allowed them to make a better console.

That's actually a good point. Nintendo has said they believe a console should exist within the $200 range. Though we'll probably see the next Xbox and PlayStation at least within the $300 range after the costly lessons learned this generation.

i'm going from the trend nintnendos other consoles

nes-innovates
snes-same thing with better ghraphics
n64-innovates
gc-same thing with better graphics
wii-innovates

so the next wii will have better graphics but not innoivate any, and the the one after that will have virtual reality or something lol.

Good point vonboy, but we also have to remember that Nintendo allegedly has learned from their mistakes and will be looking for new and creative ways to not only disrupt the market but keep up their product appeal. Whether this will happen or not is beyond any prediction at this point, but given their new management and company structure, I'm pretty sure they'd at least try to avoid the mistakes of the past.