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[Thraktor]

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Nintendo's new console, the Wii U, was finally unveiled to the world today at E3 2011, and we got a glimpse of its graphical prowess at the company's keynote. Details were scarce about the IBM silicon Nintendo's new HD powerhouse was packing, but we did some digging to get a little more info. IBM tells us that within the Wii U there's a 45nm custom chip with "a lot" of embedded DRAM. It's a silicon on insulator design and packs the same processor technology found in Watson, the supercomputer that bested a couple of meatbags on Jeopardy awhile back. Unfortunately, IBM wouldn't give us the chip's clock speeds, but if it's good enough to smoke Ken Jennings on national TV, we imagine it'll do alright against its competition from Sony and Microsoft.

Apologies to the mods if they think there are too many Wii U tech threads, but I think this warrants a thread of it's own.

The processor used in Watson is IBM's Power7, their most advanced architecture. The spec goes from 4-cores (each capable of running 4 threads) at 3Ghz up to 8-core chips at 4Ghz. Even at the lower end of the scale (which we can assume Nintendo will be using), the processor craps all over the XBox360 CPU and (for almost all uses) PS3's CELL CPU.

I'll admit I'm not an expert on modern CPU architecture (hopefully some of the GAFfers who are will chime in), but I think this should safely put to rest the "only slightly more powerful than PS360" rumours.

 

[Thraktor]

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=432965

Seems AceBandage got there first. Feel free to lock.