The Wii U operating system is set to be the biggest ever seen on a home gaming console, according to a far fledged rumor. According to a tipster with access to Wii U developers and those familiar with the console, the Wii U operating system will take up as much as 512 MB of RAM, which is unheard of in the console world. Presently, the Xbox 360 Dashboard and the PS3 OS take only about 30-50 MB of RAM. That’s about 10% of the total system memory. While Nintendo has “reserved” this huge amount of RAM, it’s not an indication that the final Wii U operating system will use that much, but it’s likely that they want to be on the safe side. We can’t imagine such a large OS layer running in the background — a game console OS is not like Windows, it doesn’t have to run a whole bunch of background tasks and features, so no matter how you cut it, 512 MB sounds excessive.
According to the source, Nintendo isn’t sure about the size of the operating system, so to be on the safe side, they have reserved 512 MB of RAM from the overall system RAM for the OS alone. This is 512 MB that developers with the latest Wii U dev kits, version 4, have not been able to use for their software. 512 MB is the total amount of memory the Xbox 360 and PS3 have, and since the Wii U is said to be only 50% more powerful than those console, to reserve 512 MB just for the OS is ludicrous. You can run a full Windows installation on 512 MB.
Related rumors have suggested that Wii U developers have had 1 GB of memory to use, which could indicate that the total Wii U RAM amount is 1.5 GB. However, none of this has been confirmed nor has there been presented any real evidence.
