Nintendo's hardware philosophy: Always old, outdated tech?

[ninzel]

No, power draw would be much less on the WiiHD.
I read the box for the next Wii was more comparable with the japanese and european version of SNES.

In design or look maybe. What I heard in terms of size was that of original Xbox 360.
And why would power draw be less on Wii2. Even if chips are same 45nm, wouldn't ramping up the speed create more heat and draw more power.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I really expect Nintendo to keep to their tradition of non-furnace like consoles. They have never built anything that was hot. They also build the most reliable hardware and high temps don't lead in that direction. They didn't even have mechanical parts (fan/optical) in the console until Gamecube.

That's not really a tradition. Their earliest consoles were with slow parts that didn't generate a lot of heat so didn't need active cooling. Once Nintendo started using hotter parts, they needed to add a fan, same as everyone else. The only difference is, where MS and Sony continued this heat escalation for one generation, Nintendo didn't, so they have one console that bucked the trend. Now I don't envisage Nintendo as the sort of company to put monster components into a monster case with a monster fan and heatsink, as they way they see their customers, IMO, they'll want to stay within a smaller, quieter form factor. But that's not from a tradition of non-furnace-like consoles; no company has a tradition of furnace-like consoles. We've only had one generation where consoles have run particularly hot, and even two hot consoles in a row wouldn't constitute a tradition.

Really, we can't look at the history of Nintendo machines that spans solid-state carts and 8 MHz components, and use that to understand how they'll design machines in an era of multi-gigahertz technology. Technology moves so fast that there can't really be traditions in this business. You have to keep evaluating and reevaluating, picking a custom part one generation and maybe completely off-the-shelf components another. Anyone who ties themselves to the way they did things with the last couple of consoles is setting themselves up for a huge and costly mistake.

 

[swaaye]

There is one definite Nintendo tradition - making money on their hardware. This necessitates cheaper hardware, which also means cooler hardware because they're not pushing manufacturing limits. The slow-parts-low-heat aspect you mentioned has not gone away.

Also they always try to give their portables a good amount of battery life which again limits power.