Ever wondered what the inside of the Wii U looks like? As part of the Iwata Asks series, four Nintendo product developers and general managers sat down this week to discuss the engineering behind the Wii U, as well as how it differs to the Wii.
There is an incredible amount of detail on the challenges and processes that went into building the console's hardware, with its designers chatting about what kind of technology went into the system. Genyo Takeda, a Senior Managing Director for the company, went into detail about the multi-core chip and why it was used as the central processing unit:
By having multiple CPU cores in a single LSI chip, data can be processed between the CPU cores and with the high-density on-chip memory much better, and can now be done very efficiently with low power consumption.
The Wii U generates three times more heat than the Wii, as it has only one heat source. This is why Nintendo introduced a heat sink, so it could dissipate the heat; but before they came to this decision they considered solutions such as making the fan bigger and raising the number of fan revolutions.
In the gallery below, you can see exactly what powers the Wii U as we are given pictures of the multi-chip module, the fan and the heat sink shield.