^Single cores allow hardware multithreading since forever. Each Xenon core runs 2 threads. And there's a great difference when coding for 1, for 2 or for 6 threads.
Pushing the GHz count is simply not optimal for game development, where you're facing highly parallelizable tasks. That's why both MS and Sony moved to many-threaded, in-order processing. I naturally assumed that if Nintendo went for a higher profile CPU they'd do the same.
A single PPC out-of-order CPU even at 2.4GHz would be way weaker than either the 360 or PS3 in every real gaming case. And talking of the GPU frequency without speaking of its architecture when it comes to memory access or shaders makes even less sense.
Please, let's just cut the technical part.

As to your last paragraph, you're basically not answering. You're assuming that a Wii with higher hardware costs, a different market of third party offerings and a higher per-game final cost would ultimately just somehow end up in the same profit for Nintendo. That's a lot of magic right there :)

And the higher software production costs would not be exclusive to first party titles, you know. They would also change how third parties approach the platform and ultimately the license revenue.

Dual irony? I find it odd that the same gamers I swore 15 years ago would be the end of hardcore gaming as I knew it would be dissing the Wii due to it's mainstream appeal.

@WereKitten: The last paragraph was the most important one. Actually it's what i have said in the thread.

So, i take your answer as there would be no difference with multithreading?

I'm not taking a stand here about which would be better thing to do, lower cycle multicore processor or higher cycle single, since essentially were talking about available floating point operation per second for a certain unit of cost. After a certain point, multicore is definately cheaper.
However, if i've understood correctly, the devs prefer a single core use if it's enough for the perfornance they're after, which would mean they don't have a problem with single core.

When it comes to shaders, it's not that much about shader architecture as it is about supported shaders.
I'm not sure what you're after with memory access, speed, latency or something else?

We obviously have completely different approach on the matter, you see the approach to HD as the route M$ and Sony took, while my approach here is how would have Nintendo made an affordable HD capable console. It wouldn't compete specswise with PS360, but it still would push out decent HD graphics and would likely be able to offer easy ports across the platforms.

Sorry, it's just when I read the post, that's what I got from it, but I probably misunderstood and took it the wrong way. Though I still stick by my original post. Everything being said against Sony and Microsoft could also be said against Nintendo. For all we know the Gameboy Colour was the trojan horse to lead Pokemon into the market, which might not be true, but Nintendo sure did take advantage of the game and used their systems to spread the  appeal of Pokemon, they created several movies, a TV series, Pokemon card's, toy's etc. Even without Pokemon, Nintendo was once a TV Network, maybe they created games to attract a fanbase toward's their characters and then made cartoon series of many of them, Mario, Zelda, Megaman, Donkey Kong, The Game Master, Kirby and F-Zero. So is Nintendo an Animation company that created games? or are they a Game company that create cartoons?. I don't like dissing Nintendo because I grew up loving their systems, but I just don't think current Nintendo fan's should be attacking other companies before they look at their own

@(bd)x3
As a quick answer: coding changes radically when you can split your load into many threads. But I've suggested several times that we let the technical specs aside, I don't think that discussion would lead to anything interesting in this context.

I don't understand what you mean when you say that I approach HD as MS and Sony. This is not about HD resolution only, but let's suppose for a while that we include processing power into the HD moniker.

You seem to be of the idea that back in 2002-2005 (when these consoles were being designed) there were cheap options that Nintendo could have chosen. I'm saying that the 360 and PS3 were designed with an architecture that was radically different from your average PC exactly to try to be competitive in processing power by the time they came out and at the same time cheaper than the equivalent PC components.

This brought costs for development of new tools and training of the developers, but was successful in bridging PC gaming to console gaming, so that nowadays many PC developers are expanding or migrating to the growing console market.

For the Wii to be in the same ballpark they would have had to go through similar costs and similar breakup from the past. In a sense the 360 and the PS3 did what you think Nintendo could have done: provide a "just good enough" HD solution.

The 360, when it came out, was as cheap as it could reasonably be - some would say even cheaper than it needed to be, as its cooling design reveled itself rushed - and yet the 360 and PS3 still weight down the requirements of console/PC development.

I can't see how this "cheap HD" Nintendo console could be born in 2005.

Unless you mean basically just a Wii capable of exactly the same games due to the memory/CPU bottleneck but with a beefier GPU capable of 720p. That was probably the only cheap upgrade option at the time that could be retrofitted to existing development tools and gamecube library. But it is very uncertain how much multiplatform development it would have encouraged.

@Doobie_wob: Megaman isn't Nintendo character. Also, Nintendo doesn't make the cartoons, or the furry toys or the plastic toys for that matter. Nintendo licences the manufacturing to toy companies that aren't even selling the toys under Nintendo brand. And the same goes for the cartoons; they aren't made by Nintendo, only licenced to outsiders, and aren't sold under Nintendo brand.

The whole issue you suggest is similar to M$ licensing Windows to Apple, that would be selling OSX as "Apple Windows".

@WereKitten: Well technical details are rather irrelevant in this context in my opinion too.

Essentially my take is Wii with higher specs.
There were lots of rumours considering Revolution back in the day, varying from a 2,4GHz single core processor to a dual core processor, so multicore wouldn't be out of the question.

Multiplatform wouldn't necessarily include PC, just porting between consoles. Even last gen, we didn't see too many console/PC multiplatform titles.

360 isn't "as cheap as it could be in 2005", it just is as cheap as it could be with desired performance. It could have been cheaper without notable (atleast in practice) drop in performance, that could have given a better cost/performance ratio.
It could also be, that M$ was targeting a performance where trying to beat them would have been financially foolish. If Cell in PS3 was supposed to be CGPU, i would say they accomplised the mission.

^Bridging to PC development opens the doors to an enormous treasure of know-how. People who spent years developing multithreaded engines and games of bigger scale than anything that was possible on earlier consoles. People who routinely wrote network code and complex AI code and better physics.

This is basically where MS aimed for the performance of the 360, and there was not much space to further cut costs. Fall short of reaching those developing resources and you're losing a lot in terms of the value of your upgrade investment.

They still make money off the merchandise, the point I was trying to make is that Nintendo has branched out into different business ventures, it's not wrong it's just business.

@WereKitten: More likely they wanted console games to Windows, not the other way around.
Upping the cost fits their strategy that they tend use everywhere they can. It's where the guy with the biggest pockets wins, since others run out of money.

This, however, is completely different matter. I don't think Nintendo, whose decision whether to make Wii in HD or not, has a lot interest in Windows gaming and they likely hadn't targeted where games made on their platform could have been easilly ported to PC.

But, you obviously agree that 360 was made as it is, because of internal decision of M$, not because you couldn't have done HD cheaper.

@Doobie_wop: Yes they have. It have changed a lot from 19:th century playing cards company. However, for the last two decades, Nintendo have been a videogames company, with no other business ventures that i can think of at the moment. Before videogames, they did try out lots of stuff, Hanafuda cards and shooting ranges being the most successful ones.