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THQ Clarifies Claims of "Horrible, Slow" Wii U CPU
An anonymous reader writes "THQ has clarified comments made by 4A Games' chief technical officer, Oles Shishkovtsov, about why their upcoming first-person shooter, Metro, won't be available for Nintendo's new Wii U console. Shishkovtsov had told NowGamer, '[The] Wii U has a horrible, slow CPU,' by way of explaining why a Wii U version of Metro wasn't in the works. Now, THQ's Huw Beynon has provided a more thorough (and more diplomatic) explanation: 'It's a very CPU intensive game. I think it's been verified by plenty of other sources, including your own Digital Foundry guys, that the CPU on Wii U on the face of it isn't as fast as some of the other consoles out there. Lots of developers are finding ways to get around that because of other interesting parts of the platform. ... We genuinely looked at what it would take to bring the game to Wii U. It's certainly possible, and it's something we thought we'd like to do. The reality is that would mean a dedicated team, dedicated time and effort, and it would either result in a detriment to what we're trying to focus on or we probably wouldn't be able to do the Wii U version the justice that we'd want.'"
SNES wasn't slower than Genesis. While the clock speeds in MHZ may say one thing, the 65c816 runs most instructions in fewer cycles than the 68000.
IBM's PowerPC are similar, plenty of instructions that offer one cycle completion as the old 65C816 did. Or better, look at the z196 that IBM has developed, its capable of 5 operations per clock cycle as IBM is a fan of one core, multiple sub-processing units.
The Cell processor used in the PS3 is one PPE "core" with 8 SPE's (processing units), one is locked from the factory, one is dedicated to the OS, and 6 are for the game itself. While the newer IBM PowerXCell 8i, at a mere 2.8Ghz, it is capable of 179.2 GFlops (SP). Because it can process 64 single precision floating point math instructions per clock cycle.
Verses the x86 (and many others from that period such as the Z80) which is actually designed as a 3 cycle per operation machine, especially when fetching data, it took 3 clock cycles to access or write the new data. The 68C816 is 1 cycle for a read or write operation.
More then likely its not a issue of the processor in the Wii, and more of a issue of how much time/money investment the Wii market is really worth to them to recompile a dedicated Wii capable binary.