Fact: Nintendo to release HD console + controllers with built-in screen late 2012

It is kind of nice indeed to have a very portable video viewing thing. I don't have a tablet but my 4" widescreen phone is surprisingly usable for it. Though I generally use it for videos more often when I'm not at home, something that wiiu remote can't do.

 

http://wii.ign.com/articles/118/1181151p1.html

 

From the rest of the article, it sounds more like Nintendo will be blocking some poor titles from being available at launch rather than making sure there will be enough AAA titles at the time.

Well, at least they'll stop really bad games from casting dark clouds over the system (Asphalt 3DS anyone?).

 

Its pretty obviously going to be more capable than 360/ps3. Even you accept its going to have more ram for instance.

 

Yeah, I have some concern though that even if it's theoretically more powerful, Nintendo might somehow mess up the architecture with a bandwidth bottleneck or some other weakness. Total random speculation of course on my part, and there's certainly no hints like that it's just a thought.

Depends on whether ATI designed the architecture or Nintendo I guess I have much more faith in ATI to know what they're doing.

 

You're obviously underestimating Nintendo way too much.

Nintendo is known to have designed the most balanced and efficient consoles ever, along with fast learning curves for developers.
Just because Nintendo chose to launch consoles with weaker hardware in the last generation, it doesn't mean any of them had unbalanced bottlenecks. The visuals they've put out with the lower specs are impressive, as you'd see when comparing late GC with XBox games.


So don't put your hopes too high on "ATI designing the system" because:
1 - ATI doesn't exist anymore
2 - Nintendo would probably be better at designing the system than any other.

 

I dont think Nintendo would be better at system design than ATI/AMD or IBM that do this for a living, but ok...especially as Nintendo hasn't been involved in "hi tech" for a long time (not that Wii U is exactly high tech).

Anyways, I imagine as a matter of course AMD/IBM had a heavy hand in things.

 

Nintendo have been puting together gaming hardware for well over 30 years, as long as the industry has been around. How many consoles have ATi/AMD or IBM put together? They make components, not systems.

It's Nintendo that make consoles for a living, not IBM nor AMD nor any other component manufacturer.

 

I think too many people underestimate Nintendo and overestimate Sony and Microsoft.
Just because this generation they went with the standard 5 year plan, then the 10 year plan.

 

I don't know about that, what about the N64 with its various issues? The PS was arguably more 'balanced and efficient' than it and it was Sony's debut console.

 

The N64 was a time Nintendo invested in then untested-in-game-field high-end technology. The biggest hindrance to the N64 was the dev kits and the microcode they supplied developers with, but when given to the right people (i.e. Factor 5), it pretty much could beat the PS in a number of departments.

They've pretty much learned a lot since then. Certain Iwata Asks segments pretty much even highlights the difficulties they had. It obviously influenced how they designed their future consoles to be more developer friendly so I don't think they're bound to repeat the same mistakes.

 

You shouldn't underestimate NTD (Nintendo Technology Development). Very capable guys.

 

The GC was probably the most efficient design that Nintendo has come up with but they had the help of ArtX which is now a part of ATI/AMD. Without ArtX the GC wouldn't have been competitive IMO.

 

Why do you discount the entire system design that Nintendo does and just focus on the CPu and GPU parts?

 

CPU and GPU is the brain and heart, everything else is ancillary and can be done by pretty much anybody...or even outsourced. Even the GOD drive was designed by Panasonic so Nintendo didn't really design much of anything. Is it that difficult to design a motherboard? I don't think so...

 

We really dont know what kind of insight Nintendo had in the design of the CPU/GPU.

We know, for example, that the CPU (geeko) had a special SMID engine by request, that helped a lot in making it a more balanced console.

But we dont know if (for example) the 64bit bus + edram (unlike the 128 bus from Xb or PS2) was Nintendo idea or ArtX (probably Nintendo as they designed the motherboard), or if the (simple) shading units of flipper is Nintendo request too?

Certainly the low level design on the components is IBM/ArtX, but on a high/more abstract level of the components Nintendo may have a quite a influence as far as we know, and probably they really do IMO.

 

I don't think Nintendo does ANY of the designs in the chips themselves. They just "request" stuff and that certainly doesn't take a design genius. The GC's overall system design was basically a Dreamcast + PS2 eg CPU was a basic IBM PPC + SIMD unit just like DC SH-4 (MIPS ISA core + SIMD unit), GPU was very similar to Graphics Synthesizer from PS2.

Heck if I had enough money even I could "design" a console by "requesting" stuff and have it built. Of course I'd have to hire some software engineers to develop a development environment but that's beside the point. In fact I could "design" one right now....custom AMD 3.2GHz APU consisting of quad core CPU + 500 shader cores, 2GB of RAM, Blu-ray drive, custom surround sound chip, Gigabit ethernet/WiFi chip, 1GB flash RAM, 250GB HDD etc...

 

Flipper was not at all similar to Graphics Synthesizer(maybe in the sense that they both draw graphics), and SH4 is not MIPS.