Up until now it was generally believed that the Wii U would pack about 1.5 times the punch of an Xbox 360 or PS3, a rumor fueled largely by Nintendo's own assertions of the same. They even claimed as much at E3—trust us, we were there.
It turns out, based on information obtained by Wii U Daily from an unnamed Japanese developer currently porting a PS3 game to the new system, that those estimates may have been slightly generous. The Wii U will reportedly carry a quad core 3GHz CPU, 768 MB of RAM, and an unknown, 40nm ATI-based GPU. This puts it at around the same power as an Xbox 360. At best, it might be a slightly more robust system.
Their source also mentioned that Nintendo's been considering another version of the console with a full gig of RAM, which might grant it an extra bit of brawn. There's still a ways to go until the console's release, though, so consider these specs less-than-final, if you please.
Do you think Nintendo should go back to the drawing board, or will these rumored specs be sufficient for the Wii U? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter or Facebook.
teufel December 4th, 2011 at 02:24 AM
It would be nice to see "journalists" read their sources before typing blather like this. The source is clearly wrong just based on the fact that it specifically states embedded DRAM for the 768MB and not RAM. If this is what passes as "journalism" then I would fire the editor. The mentioning of eDRAM being at 768 MBs would be unthinkable for a home console; the 360 only had 10 MBs. You can tell that the source was specifically making reference to eDRAM by actually stating it was embedded into the processor, and even if this was just a slip of the tongue and was only RAM, there was no mentioning of what the GPU is bringing to the console. The source mentions that the DRAM would be shared between the CPU and GPU which would be similar to how the PS3 handles part of its RAM while also having dedicated VRAM. I would hope that people would learn from this and learn to do research on terms before publishing their rough drafts.
Mike Rougeau December 4th, 2011 at 04:59 AM
I'm just reporting what the source said. It's clearly rumors and speculation—I'm not an expert on computers. Thanks for clarifying, though.
Wait a minute February 22nd, 2012 at 06:35 PM
Well, you cant just remove the erroneous information and leave the rest, now your news report speculation is flat out misinformation. Im sorry your source is a completely incompetent moron, not just in computer science, but in faking to be someone iportant on the internet, but the facts are the facts, he very specifically mentioned embedded dram, specifically said it was embedded on the processor. It very specifically points to him being completely full of crap. Removing that mistake makes it look like it could be legitimate information, when it is clearly not. You are actively making your readers stupid. Reading a gaming news site isnt supposed to make gamers stupid, its supposed to empower them with information. I dont mean to be mean, but saying you are not an expert isn't an acceptable excuse. You don't need to be an expert, you just need to know what you are talking about if you are going to make a news report about it. That doesn't require a degree, just some research, and in this day and age, google makes that very easy.
George March 8th, 2012 at 10:39 AM
The one who gave this information and wants to be unknown, is a noob and not even a developer. The wii U cpu is a power 7 model and not an xbox360 7-8 years ago tech. Meaning, the wii U quad core cpu can give REAL 95-97 gflops of performance, while the xbox360 can give 40+... The PS3 theoretically can give 200+ but in real performance, cannot exceed 25-30..! Not to speak about GPU, PS3 and 360 have very old gpus gtx7900 256vram and ati equal to xt1900 d512 ram, wii U got 768 or 1gigs of shared ram, or else it couldn't perform crispy textures at 1080p!! XBOX360 and PS3 CANT give 1080p, what the customers see in their screens, is a conversion from 720p to 1080p, thats why the graphics some times look very washed out.. The only thing that concerns me about wii U is how many of this big controllers the machine, will support at the same time.. If its 2, then they have to lock up to 2 cores exclusively for the controllers! That will decrease the wii U cpu power to around 60GFLOPS.. people must stop asking from Nintendo, wii U to support more than 1 controller of that type! As each controller, reduces the cpu by 1 core.. And we get bollocks at the end.. Is going to be their fault.