The system's memory will be 20 times that of the original Wii.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/31665
The main Wii U system memory will total 2 GB, the Nintendo Direct press conference confirmed.
Of this memory, 1 GB of RAM is intended for use by games while the other 1 GB of RAM is reserved for the Wii U system's own functionality. Nintendo pointed out that 2GB amounts to 20 times that of the original Wii. It is not clear whether more RAM will be made available to games in the future. (Support for using the second CPU core on the 3DS was added months after launch).
In addition, the Wii U will support general purpose GPU computation, meaning that non-graphics calculations can be performed on the AMD graphics processor. This is useful for highly parallel computations such as physics engines. No more details were made available.
Nintendo President Satoru Iwata also confirmed the size of the Wii U's game discs. The discs will be able to contain up to 25 GB of data, and the drive will have a read speed of 22.5 MB/s.
1 GB RAM for the OS and related Apps is crazy big for a console. I know they are moving more and more towards being media boxes, but that's a bit much. Hopefully it's more of a soft cap and memory usage is more flexible than the article indicates.
Then again, PS3 and 360 apparently have half that amount.
PS3 has 512MB of RAM, 256MB each for the CPU and GPU. It's one of the things developers hate about programming on PS3 and why voice chat isn't as fancy as it is on 360 which has a grab bag of 512MB to be allocated to whereever it's needed.
What are Nintendo's chances of still maintaining third party support with the Wii U in say about 2014 or 15 when its real competition comes out?
LOL, I think there is almost no chance of Xbox 3 or PlayStation 4 having anywhere near 8GM of RAM.
What are Nintendo's chances of still maintaining third party support with the Wii U in say about 2014 or 15 when its real competition comes out?The way things are going Wii U is going to be THE home console in japan.