jarrod said:
The chips aren't simply clocked higher, but R&D went into lowering emissions and energy consumption. It's more along the lines of what usually goes into motherboard R&D for handheld platforms (which the Wii chipset may have started out as imo) but these are actually "new" comissioned chips based on old designs. ATI actually mentioned the R&D costs for Wii's Hollywood and 360's Xenos were about even. Nintendo's obviously spent quite a bit on Wii R&D all things considered.... probably not more than PS3's huge investment (though the R&D burden of technologies like CELL and blu-ray are shared with other divisions and companies) but potentially more than went into 360.
I'd like to know which components are "exactly the same" as GameCube though... you talking about the GC controller/memory ports?
I do know that some serious R&D also went with Wii: after-all the chips are faster in pure clock-rate and supposedly they have been enhanced somewhat too while also being ported to a newer manufacturing process and tuned for low power operation as you said.
It is true that Wii is much smaller than the Xbox 360 is, but I think that Xenon and Xenos got optimized as much as they could to make them fit a certain power consumption/heat production rating that would allow them to ship with a relatively compact casing.
Also, we could argue that although neither Xenon nor Xenos/C1 are designs started from scratch just for Xbox 360, that Hollywood's and Broadway's evolution from Flipper and Gekko was a smaller jump compared to R400->Xenos (I think we could say that it comes from that R&D path) and to 1 GHz core research that produced both PPX cores (VMX-128 is a bit of a large deviation from standard VMX than Gekko's 2-way 64 bits FPU is from standard IBM designs) and CELL's PPE.
I think that optimizing (increase the performance of a chip while reducing its power consumption/heat generation characteristics at the same time) a finished and mass-manufactured design can be done more efficiently than a design that never really went out from the labs and into mass-production.
Even considering the optimization for low power operation that affected the design for Wii's chips although I could say that Xenon and Xenos received the same attention and that they are just much more performance oriented (oriented for a different market) and it was not a lack of R&D devolved to optimize their power consumption that made the difference.
I think that if we play enough with the definition of "about the same" we might as well that potentially more R&D went in Wii than into 360, but I do not take that stance.
We also have to factor Software R&D into the mix when we talk about console development and it seem fair to say that Wii's OS is still nowhere near the complexity Xbox 360's Dashboard is (leave alone background downloading, music, LIVE interface running in parallel with game execution [pressing the Xbox button/Guide button]): if the big change from the DS's OS is that instead of having me manually turn off and back on the system to apply meaningful changes or to exit from an application (it would be a manual reset if the DS had a reset button) the Wii just automates this reset procedure (which it does, it basically reboots tons of times) then I do not feel to unjustly credit Nintendo when I say that we are not facing a much more complex and advanced OS than the one that sits on the DS.
One thing I do hope they fix in a future Firmware update is the WiiConnect24's Standby mode: it gets the console too hot for my taste. It is nice that it is quite (being fan-less), but I do not see the need to get it running this hot (I do not know how much CPU power is active all the time, some reports say that the CPU runs full-speed, but I do not have any authoritative source on this element).
Perhaps they can do something about further scaling down CPU's frequency (I assume that like PSP's CPU it can quickly variate its clock-frequency) when WiiConnect24 does leave the system idle and maybe, once in a while the fans could be turned on (say every few hours) and stay on for a little while just to cool the system down a bit.
Engineering-wise, I do not think that Wii bested the Xbox 360 (engineering of the Wii Remote aside): Xenon, Xenos and ANA are among the components that sucked quite a lot of man-hours to be designed, optimized, implemented and tested.
