How the Wii was born

Zitat

It was this potential disaster that Takeda wanted to avoid. Engineer Shiota realized that simply going with "cutting-edge technology in a normal way" would lead to "higher performance and more glitz." This race for performance can be tracked by the increasing power of the central processing unit. Chips such as the triple-core Xenon in the Xbox 360 and the Cell in the PlayStation 3 use much more power than their predecessors in order to deliver next-gen performance.

"More glitz" is always welcome in any new generation, but at some point one runs into laws of diminishing returns. Shiota wondered if advances in technology could be used in a different way. The Wii was designed to take processor technology improvements and use them to make the unit run with less heat, by making the chips smaller. This enabled features that other consoles couldn't duplicate, such as the ability to leave the console powered on all the time (we'll return to this later).

[...]The Nintendo engineers and managers seemed very excited about the Wii and the potential it has to make gaming more accessible to a wider audience. They appeared to be very honest about some of the limitations they had to work around to make the Wii a finished product, although the company as a whole continues to be very reticent to reveal the "real" computing power of the Wii's CPU. Nevertheless, it seems as if the team is focusing on coming up with new game play experiences rather than just repeating the last generation, only shinier and with more polygons. Gamers around the world have reason to be excited.