Had we still been in the days where assembly skills and in depth hardware knowledge were the order of the day I might have agreed for home consoles.
There I would be poring over instruction sets, architectures and similar such things, however modern compilers/languages as well as the desire for multiplatform have made assembly as more than a learning tool largely obsolete (and security potentially troubling things a lot there as well), ignoring shader languages (which tend not to be touched that much- see why every game is gunmetal grey and dogshit brown) most people on consoles do not have to fight too hard with getting hardware focused coding done (optimisation still happens but it is more code level than hardware and back up through it all), PPC and X86 (which is hardly the greatest instruction set) both being high end CISC processors means a bit and multicore beyond 2 cores largely being a pipe dream I would then look to graphics memory setups (dedicated vs shared), capabilities for onboard storage/install (not sure what goes here- I would have thought it would have been a certainty but the 360 slim seems to have moved back a bit from that so I have no idea), disc read speeds and the actual SDK (as far as what is provided for as far as network and what is required of you to as far as interfacing with the vendor online stuff). The only thing that might see me raise an eyebrow is the speed and precision of the floating point engine; the PS3/early Cell caught some flak for not having terribly high precision floating point engine.
Will I be able to use the term WiiPS720u similar to how I use PS360 today- not unless someone in an investment side of a game company gets broken in the head, calls someone that channels http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html and they port a lazily made PS720 title to the Wii U. Can I see a slight graphical downgrade* but still essentially the same game vs the current "they share a similar name" model- absolutely.
*asterisk as it could be the case that not everybody wants to employ seven kinds of texture artist and will instead just kick their 3d modeller the job as it was back in the day and the WiiPS720u becomes a valid term after all. Indeed several companies seem to have already gone in for this and made several games I actually quite like (alpha protocol and Deadly Premonition to name but two), not to mention the increased look at things like cel shading.
There I would be poring over instruction sets, architectures and similar such things, however modern compilers/languages as well as the desire for multiplatform have made assembly as more than a learning tool largely obsolete (and security potentially troubling things a lot there as well), ignoring shader languages (which tend not to be touched that much- see why every game is gunmetal grey and dogshit brown) most people on consoles do not have to fight too hard with getting hardware focused coding done (optimisation still happens but it is more code level than hardware and back up through it all), PPC and X86 (which is hardly the greatest instruction set) both being high end CISC processors means a bit and multicore beyond 2 cores largely being a pipe dream I would then look to graphics memory setups (dedicated vs shared), capabilities for onboard storage/install (not sure what goes here- I would have thought it would have been a certainty but the 360 slim seems to have moved back a bit from that so I have no idea), disc read speeds and the actual SDK (as far as what is provided for as far as network and what is required of you to as far as interfacing with the vendor online stuff). The only thing that might see me raise an eyebrow is the speed and precision of the floating point engine; the PS3/early Cell caught some flak for not having terribly high precision floating point engine.
Will I be able to use the term WiiPS720u similar to how I use PS360 today- not unless someone in an investment side of a game company gets broken in the head, calls someone that channels http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html and they port a lazily made PS720 title to the Wii U. Can I see a slight graphical downgrade* but still essentially the same game vs the current "they share a similar name" model- absolutely.
*asterisk as it could be the case that not everybody wants to employ seven kinds of texture artist and will instead just kick their 3d modeller the job as it was back in the day and the WiiPS720u becomes a valid term after all. Indeed several companies seem to have already gone in for this and made several games I actually quite like (alpha protocol and Deadly Premonition to name but two), not to mention the increased look at things like cel shading.
