If you've been holding your breath about Nintendo's newest console, awaiting some juicy new info and some fatty specification details, well some have surfaced but they probably won't be to your liking. Following up on the Xbox 720 specs rumor, a Japanese developer working on porting over a PS3 title to the Wii U let slip some meaty details on Nintendo's latest console hardware.
According to Wii U Daily, the unnamed developer sent over these specifications...
Quad Core, 3 GHz PowerPC-based 45nm CPU, very similar to the Xbox 360 chip.768 MB of DRAM “embedded” with the CPU, and shared between CPU and GPUUnknown, 40nm ATI-based GPU
According to the dev, Nintendo is testing two different iterations of the Wii U, funnily enough one with 768MB of DRAM and one with 1GB of DRAM. Both versions feature embedded memory chips and as mentioned in the quoted specs, both versions of the Wii U will have shared memory access just like the Xbox 360 and PS3, which technically doesn't make it much of a leap beyond current gen tech.
Even with a paltry 1GB of DRAM that's still just not enough, especially given that it's going to have to share with the graphics processing as well. In other words, the Wii U would be maxed out before any of the newer consoles even landed on retailer shelves. While the argument can be made that consoles run less processes than PCs, consoles still have a lot of processes running in the background, such as cross-game voice chat, downloads, streaming, or even music playing in your favorite games. Technically, you could say 1GB of RAM on a newer console would be equivalent to about 4GB of RAM on a 64bit PC, which is pretty much low-end compared to today's standard.
Nevertheless, if Nintendo's price-point is going to be about $199 then I can't argue with that. But if those really are the specs and Nintendo is planning on future-proofing, then the only good thing about it will be the CPU setup, which is just one half-generation behind what the Xbox 720 is rumored to run.
Exact specs on the Wii-pad haven't been released yet but I assume those are coming soon, too.
We'll definitely learn more about the console and the Wii-pad sooner rather than later as Nintendo gears up to release the console next fall.
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