A senior hardware development director at Nintendo has come to the defense of the Nintendo Wii U's CPU.
According to an article on Computer and Video Games, Nintendo's R&D director Genyo Takeda responded to negative feedback about the CPU while speaking at a Kyoto investors meeting.
"Regarding your comment that we focus on the GPU and that the CPU is a little poor, we have a different view," Takeda said. "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 continued, "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."
According to the CVG, Takeda claims that raw CPU speed is no longer as essential to overall hardware performance.
"We have taken a so-called 'memory-intensified' design approach for the Wii U hardware," Takeda said. "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."
Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello recently said during an investor call that EA knows the specifications of the next generations of video game consoles and that he believes the industry has not yet entered the next gen.
"Ours is an industry where a lot of devices come in and represent themselves as the next generation, or the next generation after that," Riccitiello said. "In many ways we would argue that what we're describing as 'Gen 4' is yet to come. It's that that we're excited about, and that's what we're investing in."
Nintendo has also recently reduced its sales goal of 5.5 million Wii U consoles sold by year's end to 4 million units. The Wii U has only sold 3.06 million units since its launch in November 2012 and only 11.69 million Wii U video games have been shipped.
