The Wii U spills its guts in front of a 'Iwata Asks' panel
Nintendo has released a series of photos to give everyone an idea of what the Wii U is made of. As a part of the most recent Iwata Asks panel, Nintendo engineers reviewed the console innards explaining the CPU/GPU combo, heat sink, and fan components.
There is even a comparison to the evolution from Wii to Wii U. To read through the entire panel, you can head to Nintendo’s website. Above is a gallery of the breakdown and the official specs of the Wii U are below. Now if we only knew what was going on with the Nintendo Network…?
- Internal memory: Basic – 8GB internal flash, Deluxe – 32GB internal flash.
- Wii U game discs: 25GB in size.
- Power: Bundled AC adapter – uses 75 watts of power when playing, 45 watts in power save mode.
- Dimensions: 46 mm x 172 mm x 268.5 mm in the horizontal position.
- TV Display: HDMI up to 1080p
- System memory: 1GB
- Game memory: 1GB
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g1 DISCUSSIONS
FayAlterman44
Utterly pent content material, appreciate it for selective information. vigrx I have not checked in here for some time as I thought it was getting boring, but the last several posts are great quality so I guess I will add you back to my everyday bloglist. You deserve it friend :)
Danode
Every time I see a small fan in that size I think of one thing: high-pitched noise.
Steeler
So uhh.. do these specs surpass current consoles like 360 and PS3?
Evilkinggumby
It looks like what I speculated in my comments on the last article you guys bumped to the front page(2nd page of Doctor Rover's comments) about the WiiU's specs may be fairly right. What it LOOKS like, to me, is effectively the mainboard of this system is just a big ol "all-in-one" video card(at best a Radeon 6750, or older) that had a CPU added to the GPU die. Use of the hard drive, cd drive and main system functions are handled mostly by the CPU but the gpgpu will pick the slack with certain functions, as well handling all audio encoding/decoding(so there may be no independent sound board).
Which makes sense. IF all the system is is a glorified video card, it is fairly cheap to manufacture(the Radeon 6750 costs as little as $80 at newegg, so minus markup you see just how cheap), but also easy to slap into the LCD controller. Without needing a hard drive or cd drive, the mainboard slightly shrunk and the CPU removed, could easily fit into that controller(where the WiiU would stream data from the disc/drive wirelessly). If they slap a good amount of memory on the controller, you could offload a game almost entirely to the controller to play (simpler games like the SMB games or downloaded emulated games) but I have to doubt a larger HD game like MW3 would run entirely off the controller with the Wiiu away.
Other possibility is that the controller contains just a small HD video chip that simple decodes video from the WiiU and all main processing is still done on the console, then just streamed locally. Only issue with that is latency.. I don't know how fast or slow the loop from console to controller and back would be.
Evilkinggumby
LOL umm.. no. Based on the specs and details that have been given (which is still fairly vague) I would say it doesn't surpass it. As it is an interview with a dev stated the CPU for the wiiu is slightly slower than the xbox 360. It is a system that is a jump for NINTENDO at least.
Whatthefnu
Alright, now THIS is exciting. I am a techie; the kind who's taken apart his share of Super Nintendos and studied why they work. So, without weighing you down with too many details, in layman's terms: this is a pretty sexy machine.
Zigman
Cool. Can't wait to try it out.
darkhyrulelord
This reminds me of my clear, purple N64 controller where you can see all of its CPU insides.
NinjaRed64
i wonder why they would go for 8GB on the standard model. tech limitations perhaps? i'm not that big on tech specs so i don't know.
Tetsamaru
Well believe it or not, but for very casual audiences, those 8GB is actually more than enough. I've sold and worked with alot of Nintendo Wii's to customers that STILL have not filled up their game system's memory. And they've had it since almost launch date. And their entire library of games is like....10 Wii games. For the stereotypical Grandparents and Soccer Mom demographic, i really don't see 8GB being an issue for them.