Wii U will be N's first completely new hardware since Gamecube [TECH-DISCUSSION]

"Wii U will be N's first TOTALLY NEW hardware since Gamecube "

you make it sound like Game Cube is from 3 generations ago or something

Well that's certainly not what I intended.

Gamecube was however, designed in the late 1990s, which *was* a LONG time ago.

These were Miyamoto's words about Gamecube shortly after Spaceworld 2000

Miyamoto talks about Polygons

"Polygon movement is essential in the creation of 3D games. Therefore,
we are taking various steps to simplify polygon movement. Namely, this
includes calculation of polygon display, properly shading and lighting
the polygons and applying the textures. Whenever new hardware comes
out, the manufacturer always talks about how many million polygons it
puts out, but never mentions that when textures are applied only half
that can be handled. Then when you do the lighting calculations, the
number halves again. So the actual number of polygons is half of half,
or about 1/10th of what they say. So if the specs say the machine can
do 80-100 million polygons, that really translates to roughly 5-8
million.

Polygon-pushing power isn't enough; game machines have to be able to
handle things like terrain and collision detection too. When the CPU
handles these tasks, it can't do much else. With the GameCube, we've
divided the tasks up as much as possible to eliminate bottlenecks. If
you simply look at the documented specs for existing systems, they may
seem to be the latest and greatest things at the moment, but in a year
or so they'll already be outdated. On the other hand, looking at the
GameCube, I think it will have a shelf life of many years. We wanted
to make a piece of hardware that would free developers from worrying
about technical stuff like polygons or bottlenecks."

"Some people might say; 'GameCube isn't great, just look at its CPU
power.' The truth is though, for tasks such as drawing pictures or
making music, GameCube doesn't use the CPU. I think the balance of the
GameCube hardware will lead the industry for years
to come. Existing consoles aren't capable of producing the demo's we
showed at Spaceworld. In fact, I think the demo's resemble graphics
created by multi-million dollar workstations."