State Of The Wii Union - News Feature

More indications have emerged to support reports from earlier in the week that the hardware capabilities of Nintendo's Wii U console are superior to those of the Xbox 360/PS3.

According to an Engadget article (sourced via Game Watch), the AMD graphics chip in the Wii U is similar to the R770 found in AMD's HD 4000 series of PC cards. In effect then, these are chip-sets that first emerged in 2008 and are DX10.1 compliant.

Microsoft's Xbox 360 runs off chip-sets that only support DX9 and, while Sony's PS3 chip-set does support DX10, the R770 chip that's been speculated for the Wii U is significantly more advanced than the PS3's RSX chip.

All of this does appear to favour alleged reports that the Wii U is 50% more powerful than its PS3/Xbox 360 counterparts. Whether that increase in performance has any bearing in reality effectively now comes down to IBM's processor for the console.

Very little is officially known about the CPU at this stage other than that it's a multi-core, 45nm processor with embedded DRAM. Reports have also linked the Wii U processor to IBM's 'Watson' technology which, again, remains relatively intangible.

To prove the capabilities of this technology, IBM has publicly demonstrated the 'Watson' supercomputer playing TV quiz show Jeopardy against human champions and winning (see trailer below).



While this Jeopardy challenge could be cynically seen as something of a PR stunt, IBM has had a clear focus on the project to solve 'open question answering' problems in computing. Put simply, computers struggle to understand the nuances of human language and 'Watson' seeks to solve that.

However, these tests were run through an IBM 'Power 7' supercomputer and no mass-market 'Watson' processor has been released by IBM so far. Judging from the video below, a mass-market chip is some way off at the very least given that a single processor would take two hours to compute the same problems solved by the 'Power 7' supercomputer used for 'Watson'.



In effect then, it seems highly unlikely that gamers will be able to ask their Wii U trivia questions and expect a cogent answer. What's much more likely is that the link between 'Watson' and the Wii U is a cheeky little piece of marketing spiel.

Whatever the case though, judging from the graphics chip info that's emerged over the last 24 hours, Nintendo does appear to be finding that 50% gap between console generations that will help its cause significantly when the Wii U comes to market next year.

As high-end PC rigs lead the way towards next-gen technology with DX11 graphics cards and quad-core processors, a picture of the Wii U is starting to emerge that's somewhere between that and what the PS3/Xbox 360 currently offer.