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Nintendo Wii U Teardown Reveals Simple Design

Posted by timothy on from the to-thine-own-hand-be-true dept.

Vigile writes "Nintendo has never been known to be very aggressive with its gaming console hardware and with today's release (in the U.S.) of the Wii U we are seeing a continuation of that business model. PC Perspective spent several hours last night taking apart a brand new console to reveal a very simplistic board and platform design topped off with the single multi-chip module that holds the IBM PowerPC CPU and the AMD GPU. The system includes 2GB of GDDR3 memory from Samsung and Foxconn/Hon-Hai built wireless controllers for WiFi and streaming video the gamepad. Even though this system is five years newer, many analysts estimate the processing power of Nintendo's Wii U to be just ahead of what you have in the Xbox 360 today."

3 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. well doh. keep it cheap and simple. by gl4ss · · Score: 5, Interesting

    that's the nintendo way. which device from them had a complicated board or cutting edge performance?

    --
    world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    1. Re:well doh. keep it cheap and simple. by LordLimecat · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I also dont remember any substantial load times for any cartridge-based games. If you want a good comparison, compare the performance of Chrono Trigger on the SNES to the Chrono Trigger / Final Fantasy CD for the Playstation; every time you paused or had a battle on the PS version, you incurred a 30 second load time which made the game unplayable.

      There are a lot of benefits to discs, but there are also a lot of drawbacks-- notably, seek performance sucks compared to cartridge.

  2. Re:PS3 by LordLimecat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't remember the full results but I think we figured out accessing the hard drive on the Xbox360 was faster than the RAM on the WiiU too.

    Forgive me if Im skeptical of an AC claiming that a company who has been creating consoles for 30+ years managed to make RAM slower than disk access. That would be basically impossible to pull off even if you were specifically trying to do so; theres about 3 orders of magnitude difference between the speed of the two.

    Cache vs RAM is also a bit hard to believe, but at least there youre only talking one or two orders of magnitude.