Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata revealed some Wii U specs via the Japanese Nintendo Direct. He says that the system will include 2 GB of total system memory. 1 GB of memory will be available for games, while another 1 GB will be available for the Wii U operating system and background applications. 1 GB of memory for the OS is definitely a lot for a home gaming console — the current generation systems use about only 1/20th of that. Perhaps the OS includes a lot more than are we currently aware of. Or some of the background applications take up a lot of resources, such as Miiverse and its many features.
Nintendo also revealed that the system will consume only 75 W of power under full load, which is about half as much as current generation consoles from Microsoft and Sony. The power consumption drops to 40 W when used for menu, Miiverse and other non-gaming applications. The Wii U storage media is confirmed to be Blu-ray based and support up to 25 GB of data per disc, at 22.5 MB/s data transfer rate. Nintendo might reveal more Wii U specs tomorrow at the event in New York.
