I'm all for a "sexy" design point is it doesn't have to rhyme with sucky hardware.
Now we have parts as the A6-4400M that offer comparable (better in some regards) than our 7 year old consoles. It's a salvaged part bu it would be otherwise pretty tiny it has a nice 35Watts TDP. You can fed it using cheap ddr3 ram. It's a Trinity with "half of everything disable pretty much, it would be tiny if it were not a salvaged part.
That's not an optimal design far from that but it proves that for that level performance (matching 7 years old hardware and more) bandwidth is not that critical. SOC have the advantage that they allow really simple design, you have your SoC a 128 bit bus your DDR3 chips and you are ready to go.
What I don't get is that Nintendo doesn't seem bent on beating the ps360 (looking at their comm not at all), they seems to be really concern with BOM so why go with fully custom parts and a design that includes lot of edram?
Doesn't make sense to me and it comes at price, Nintendo have trade extra RAM and extra processing power for lot of edram. While going for a custom GPU they also gave on more modern, efficient and fully featured architecture.
Going with IBM and AMD they should have asked them to integrate existing technologies on TSMC 40 nm.
The SOC could have consisted of 6 off the shelves PPC 470S and 4 SIMD 8 ROPS GPU based on southern Island architecture (like in Trinity). The SOC is linked through a dual channel to 1 GB of DDR3.
(2GB would have been nice though, I searched on newegg 2GB of DDR3 1600 cost
9.99$, faster ddr3 like 1866 costs 16.99. Trinity in its laptop form has been reviewed mostly with the former so it ain't that bad).
That would have been familiar for the devs , like on the 360 the CPU is a SMP set-up you have 6 hardware threads to play with, on the GPU side more like on the PS3 you to be more careful about the bandwidth.
Instead of EDRAM they would have include a clever power management system like in trinity that may have allowed them to grab some extra performances in what is a pretty power constrained system.
For the ref my laptop use a A8-3500M and has a tdp of 35 watts that with a redwood class GPU running at 444MHz and a CPU running at 1.5GHz it runs games in set-up comparable to nowadays console
pretty well. (I mean it's not amazing but once you takes in account all the optimizations going in the console realm the things does more than well).
Overall it would still have extra head room vs the ps360 for the wiimote as I would be such a system performs sightly better than the ps360 combo.
My problem with the WiiU now is that it "may" have a GPU a bit more powerful with a lot more bandwidth but it might not be able to make a difference (pretty much like the difference in RSX and Xenos didn't amount to much ultimately from the average pov).
In favor of my straight SoC you have a simple UMA design with no restriction on the render targets sizes, if you want to go with a 64MB G-Buffer ala Killzone, no problemo. The GPU would have support directx 11 features and be more modern.
Then there is the pretty scary remark with regard to the CPU power.
With 6 cores @1.6 GHz, more cache, and a clever turbo mode I would expect that CPU to out perform Xenon on average.
The worth part is I expect Nintendo solution to be more expansive on every regards, from R&D, the size of the chip, the complexity of the mobo, etc.
I'm not an engineers, I don't think Nintendo engineers suck either but there is definitely something wrong in the decision process at Nintendo HQ.
The usage Nintendo envision for its device and the way they plan to market things is one thing, like for the 3DS sucky hardware is sucky hardware.
