Hector Martin, he who put together the first open-source driver for Microsoft’s Kinect two years ago, now says he’s cracked open the Wii U.
https://kotaku.com/victor-declared-in-hack-kinect-bounty-hunt-5687002
He won’t say what he did to get the details out of Nintendo’s latest console, but he did tweet some juicy (and very, very technical) tidbits about the system:
https://twitter.com/embed/status/273970271449411584
https://twitter.com/embed/status/274179198141206528
https://twitter.com/embed/status/274179630599131136
https://twitter.com/embed/status/274180424178233345
https://twitter.com/embed/status/274181497370591233
https://twitter.com/embed/status/274182672652308480
So what can we make of all this? For starters, it sounds like Kotaku‘s reporting over the summer—that the Wii U will be a “power orphan” compared to its next-gen competitors—was spot on. As Stephen wrote then:
https://kotaku.com/the-wii-us-power-problem-5920931
But one insider who has had access to the machine says that the console’s impressive AMD Radeon-based graphics chip is off-set by a CPU that runs at low speeds, can do out-of-order processing but has fewer threads than the 360.
Also worth noting: just last week, one of the developers behind Metro: Last Light said the Wii U has a “horrible, slow CPU.” Martin’s discoveries seem to match that theory, as well as Digital Foundry’s thoughts on how Mass Effect 3 runs on the three different consoles
https://kotaku.com/the-wii-u-has-a-horrible-slow-cpu-according-to-these-5962354
We’ll be following this story and continuing to talk to developers about the Wii U’s power as time goes on.
