Ars Technica Confirms Wii is Souped Up Gamecube
There was some mild uproar (probably not justified at the time) over Wii demos running on Gamecubes at E3. Ultimately, this kind of activity is done all the time, from Sony using older hardware to Microsoft running 360 demos from their Dual-G5 alpha dev kits. Not really a big deal.
However, an Ars Technica writer has pretty much confirmed what had been rumored back in August. The Wii’s CPU is almost exactly the same as the Gamecube’s.
A poster at the Ace’s Hardware message board has dug up a new IBM datasheet for the 750CL, which is a new derivative of the IBM 750 (a.k.a. the G3). Based on the information revealed in the datasheet, the 750CL is basically just a 90nm die shrink of the Gekko hardware that’s intended to run at up to 900MHz. IBM almost certainly would not go to the trouble of launching an updated version of Gekko on a new process, unless what many have said all along is in fact true: Broadway is a faster, lower-power version of the GameCube’s Gekko hardware.
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Well, this was pretty obvious considering Nintendo has never called their system “Next Gen”.
Great way to keep dev costs down, just release the same system with a new controller and built-in WiFi. That’s basically what we have here.
Yep, but we knew this all along.
What’s odd is that the Wii’s being underpowered compared to the other consoles is so well-known, yet it still has so much buzz around it. Whether this holds up over time is anyone’s guess, but it is certainly going to be an interesting race to watch.