A senior hardware development director at Nintendo has defended the Wii U‘s processor power.
It was in November 2012 a hacker posted what was assumed to be the Wii U’s processor and graphic card specifications. Through this hack we learned that the Wii U’s CPU carries a clock speed of 1.24 GHz.
The clock speed was half of the speed which we found in PS3 and Xbox 360. This caused quite a lot of critique, since the two consoles are about six years old. However, Nintendo’s R&D director Genyo Takeda believes the hardware critique is not justified.
According to Takeda, the Wii U apparently combined both low power consumption with a fairly high performance. Takeda’s answers below were an answer from an audience member who said the processor was weaker than other parts of the device.
“Regarding your comment that we focus on the GPU and that the CPU is a little poor, we have a different view,” Takeda said.
“It depends on how to evaluate a processing unit. In terms of die size [area a chip occupies], the GPU certainly occupies a much larger space than the CPU.
“As you can see CPUs used for the latest PCs and servers, however, it is usual for current CPUs that the logic part for actual calculations is really small and that the cache memory called SRAM around it covers a large area. From this angle, we don’t think that the performance of the Wii U’s CPU is worse than that of the GPU.”
Furthermore, Takeda said that raw CPU power is no longer as central as it used to be in overall hardware performance.
“We have taken a so-called ‘memory-intensified’ design approach for the Wii U hardware. It is no use saying much about hardware which should remain in the background in our entertainment offerings, but at least we think that Wii U performs pretty well.”
- Donate via PayPal
