14 DAY TRIAL // 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.