The company opted to focus on the memory in its new console

Feb 7, 2013 08:04 GMT  ·  By

Nintendo has begun discussing the internal components of its recently released Wii U and revealed that the CPU, which has already been criticized by developers, is just big enough to deliver a good experience, as the company focused more on putting a large amount of memory in the device.

The Wii U came out last year and attracted quite a lot of customers, while receiving plenty of interesting games, both exclusivities and adaptations of titles that already appeared on different consoles or the PC.

Even so, some developers complained of the console's limited power, blaming the sub-par CPU for not offering an experience similar to the components seen inside the PS3 or Xbox 360.

In order to shed some light on Nintendo's strategy with the Wii U's hardware, the company's Research and Development Director Genyo Takeda revealed, via CVG, that the core strategy wasn't to completely focus on the CPU.

"It depends on how to evaluate a processing unit. In terms of die size [area a chip occupies], the GPU certainly occupies a much larger space than the CPU," he said, claiming that the CPU combines "low power consumption and a fairly high performance."

"As you can see CPUs used for the latest PCs and servers, however, it is usual for current CPUs that the logic part for actual calculations is really small and that the cache memory called SRAM around it covers a large area. From this angle, we don't think that the performance of the Wii U's CPU is worse than that of the GPU."

Takeda also emphasizes that raw CPU power is no longer an important factor when it comes to creating video game consoles, as what really matters is the amount of memory and what you can do with the whole device.

"We have taken a so-called 'memory-intensified' design approach for the Wii U hardware. It is no use saying much about hardware which should remain in the background in our entertainment offerings, but at least we think that Wii U performs pretty well."

As of right now, Nintendo still needs to convince people to invest in the Wii U instead of waiting for the announcements of next-generation consoles from the likes of Sony or Microsoft later this year.