The Wii U I use. CC0
The Wii U was Nintendo’s entry in the 8th console generation, released in late 2012. It was widely regarded as a failure.
From a hardware perspective the Wii U is largely an evolution of the Wii architecture, which itself was an evolution of the Gamecube architecture. Here are the specs, as per copetti.org, a site that does technical deep-dives on old game consoles, among other things.
- CPU: Tri-core IBM PowerPC “Espresso” clocked at 1.24GHz.
“Espresso” is a derivitave of the “Broadway” CPU of the Wii, which itself is a deriviate of the “Gekko” CPU of the Gamecube, which in turn is derived from the PowerPC 750CXe, a G3 chip
Which means that the Wii U, from 2012, uses a heavily modified G3. - GPU: AMD “Latte” clocked at 550 MHz.
“Latte” is speculated to derive from the Radeon HD 4000 series. - RAM: around 2GB of DDR3
- Storage: 1GB of NAND flash and either 8 or 32GB of eMMC storage.
In addition, my Wii U has a 16GB SD card for the Linux bootloader and other homebrew-related stuff and a 128GB SanDisk flash drive for Linux.
The Wii U I use is actually on long term loan to me (well, my family but I’m the one using it right now) from my Dad’s brother. It is completely possible one day he will demand it back and this page will unexpectedly cease to exist. However, we’ve had it for years at this point, so I don’t see that happening any time soon.
Back in December of 2023, I finally got permission to install homebrew and Linux on this Wii U and have been doing cursed things to it ever since. For example, it is currently running a Minecraft server (mc.wiiulinux.net) and the web server this very page is hosted on.