Nintendo Wii U gets a teardown

Nintendo recently launched their next generation game console called the Wii U, which comes with a very unique controller that has a touchscreen that can be used to interact with the game in different ways.

The console has now been acquired and ripped apart by AnandTech to see what’s ticking inside. Let’s take a look.

Unlike mobile devices, larger machines such as consoles are relatively easy to take apart so with only a minimal effort will you be able to get inside the console. One of the first things noted is the optical storage medium used by Nintendo. It uses high density 12cm discs that look like any other CD or DVD but uses Nintendo’s proprietary format to store up to 25GB of data per disc. While it’s significantly better than the now thoroughly outdated DVD format used by Microsoft on the Xbox 360, one wonders why Nintendo simply did not use Sony’s Blu-ray format instead of creating their own as that would have also enabled the playback of Blu-ray movies on the console.

The Wii U has two Wi-Fi antennas inside, one for the 802.11 a/b/g/n connectivity for the console and the other interestingly for communicating with the controller over Miracast.

The Wii U uses 8GB or 32GB flash memory (depending upon the model you purchased) manufactured by Samsung and four 512MB RAM modules manufactured by Hynix. The CPU is based on the PowerPC architecture and is using IBM’s 45nm process. The GPU is an AMD RV7xx model based on a 40nm process although the exact model number is unknown. The Wii U has a memory bandwidth of 12.8GB/s, more than twice of Wii’s 5.6GB/s and on par with that of the iPad with Retina display and the Nexus 10, although the Wii U will be pushing a lot less pixels than either of these tablets.

You can read the full teardown report in the link below.

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