On Jun 29, 7:12 am, Sean hotmail.com> wrote:

Next-gen? You mean current-gen. Xbox 360, PlayStation3 are current-
gen.
If you factor Wii in as not of the same gen as 360/PS3, then wouldn't
you concider Wii to be last-gen? Like GameCube, PS2, Xbox1 and even
Dreamcast.

I concider Wii to be, last-gen in terms of chipset (CPU, GPU) with a
'new-gen' control scheme.

It's certainly true of the chipset because the IBM Broadway CPU & ATI
(AMD) Hollywood GPU are nothing more than higher clocked (by 50%% aka
1.5x) revisions of the Gekko CPU & Flipper GPU in GameCube, which were
both designed in the late 1990s.

BTW, Flipper was completed in 2000, long before the late-2001 release
of GameCube, but I still concider it late 90s tech. Thus, I concider
Wii's graphics also, late 90s tech. There are no significant upgrades
to the GPU architecture, only minor tweaks and clockspeed increase
(from 162 MHz to 243 MHz), and the chip is smaller, on a smaller
manufacturing fab process:
(Hollywood is on 90nm - Flipper was on 180nm). All of this does not
change the fact that Wii's graphics engine/GPU is still very much a
late 1990s architecture.

The Hollywood GPU that powers Wii graphics is, in terms of power/
performance & rendering features, roughly somewhere inbetween ATI
R100 / Radeon64 (mid 2000) and R200 / Radeon 8500 (late 2001).
Hollywood is nowhere NEAR the performance/capability of R300 / Radeon
9700 (mid 2002), The same is true of Flipper.

Also, just so nobody is confused, the Flipper & Hollywood GPUs in
GameCube & Wii have a totally different architecture than R100/
Radeon64, R200/Radeon 8500, and R300/Radeon 9700 with basicly
nothing in common--Even though the ArtX design team that designed the
R300 /9700 was almost all the same people at ATI that designed
Flipper, and thus Hollywood since Hollywood has the same architecture.

Sorry to make that so long, what I was going to say about NEXT-GEN,
before I sidetracked, next-gen now means consoles & handhelds that
are in development. Some of which have been in R&D for a few years,
already, and which won't be coming out until early in the next decade.

i.e.

[*] The 3rd-generation Xbox console
[*] PSP 2
[*] Nintendo DS2 / Nintendo's next handheld
[-] Microsoft's rumored Xbox-branded handheld (not Zune 2)
[*] Wii HD / Nintendo's next console
[*] PlayStation 4
[-] The possible Apple console and/or handheld (patents)

[*] very likely to be released
[-] uncertain about release