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December 6th, 2011, 18:31 GMT · By

Leaked Nintendo Wii U Specs Show Hardware Similar to Xbox 360 or PS3

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The Wii U is coming next year
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While the Nintendo Wii U’s release date of summer 2012 is still quite far away, a brand new set of presumed specifications for the new console have been leaked on the web, which show that the device isn’t that different from the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, for example.

The Nintendo Wii U was presented to the world back at E3 2011, and immediately some developers claimed that it was almost 50 percent more powerful than the PS3 or Xbox 360, sparking some rather heated debates in the industry.

Now, a new list of specs have appeared, via The Wii U Daily, which show that the new Nintendo console might not be all that more impressive than its rivals.

First up, the device is powered by a Quad Core, 3GHz PowerPC-based 45nm CPU, which is a bit more powerful than the Xbox 360’s 3.2 GHz PowerPC Tri-core CPU, and on par with the PlayStation 3’s 3.2 GHz Cell hardware.

There’s 768MB of DRAM, which is ‘embedded’ with the CPU and shared between it and the GPU. The graphics are handled by a 40nm chip made by AMD.

The source, which is a Japanese developer currently working on porting an existing PlayStation 3 game to the Wii U, also says that Nintendo has shipped two devices up until now, one with 768MB of RAM and the other with 1GB, which is also made by IBM and embedded o the CPU.

Both versions will give the Wii U an advantage over its rivals, as the Xbox 360 has 512MB of RAM while the PlayStation 3 gives 256MB to the system and 256MB to the graphics processor.

This information is shaky, however, so, until E3 2012 when Nintendo is expected to show off the final version of the Wii U, probably before a release at the end of summer or beginning of autumn, we still don’t know what the small white device can do.

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READER COMMENTS:


Comment #1 by: teufel on 06 Dec 2011, 19:30 UTC reply to this comment

Do you even know what POWER7 is let alone DRAM?

DRAM does not equal RAM, and RAM is typically with the GPU.

You shame the idea of journalism by doing no research. Try looking up bits vs bytes on top of looking up what 96MBs of eDRAM compared to what the 360 has to offer, only 10MBs of eDRAM.


Comment #2 by: shadow on 07 Dec 2011, 01:48 UTC reply to this comment

I just hope it will be better


Comment #3 by: jIZZy on 22 Dec 2011, 19:37 UTC reply to this comment

U missunderstood. It has 768mb of eDRAM (embedded DRAM) that's not the same as RAM. The xbox 360 only has 10mb of eDRAM


Comment #4 by: BW202 on 22 Dec 2011, 23:24 UTC reply to this comment

Today's single-core 3GHz processors would be almost as powerful as the 360's processor. A quad-core at that speed is probably 100% more powerful at the least. There is more to processors than how many GHz it has.


Comment #5 by: Kilobit on 05 Jan 2012, 03:00 UTC reply to this comment

Let me just start off by saying this for a lot of you who really don't understand the specs of all 3 systems The xbox 360 has a 256-bit graphics bus interface comparable to an ATI Radeon HD3870 not that great of a gpu considering it's 4 generations behind The PS3 has a 128-bit graphics interface comparable to an Nvidia 7800GT which is 5 going on 6 generations behind in the graphics card industry. The reason for this is cost they are not going to put a top of the line GPU in a console that will cost anywhere from $300-$600 Nintendo hasn't really tried to go out and kick * with hardware specs since the Game Cube because it * near bankrupted them,The Wii U will be a significant upgrade from the Wii but that's about it.

Comment #5.1 by: achilles on 26 Feb 2012, 23:57 GMT

You're a fool if you think the Wii U isn't going to * away the 360/PS3.

It's using a PowerPC 7 cpu with embeded ram, and it's GPU is rumored to be from the HD 4800 class family, but nothing further is known about that. The 4800 GPU class can pump 5x more GFLOPS than the current best GPU found in consoles, the 360's xenos gpu.

Too many people are underestimating the Wii U's power. It won't be cutting edge, but it will be a significant upgrade over the 2005 tech found in the current consoles. The Zelda e3 tech demo was done in real time and it looked amazing in comparison to what we can get out of the 360/ps3.

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