The recently unveiled Nintendo Wii successor, the Wii U is said to be 50 percent more powerful than the Sony PS3. Nintendo, for its part, has not given any details of the hardware powering its new console. However, Sterne Aree analyst Arvind Bhatia has talked to developers working with the new platform. According to his sources, Bhatia reports “the console will have 50 percent more processing power compared to the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.”
The CPU powering the Wii U is known to be sourced from IBM and runs the same PowerPC architecture that powered the Gamecube, the Wii (as well as Apple’s PCs before the switch to Intel). IBM has given away that the Wii U is using the same technology powering its Watson supercomputer. It is known that the Watson uses POWER7 architecture, although IBM will not yet confirm that the Wii U CPU is indeed using POWER7 tech.
Regardless, claims that the Wii U is 50 percent more powerful than both the PS3 and the Xbox 360 are not unreasonable. It has been several years since the introduction of the PS3 and the Xbox 360. While both packed powerful hardware on their introduction, the best personal computers today have at least ten times more processing power than either of these consoles
