Latest Iwata Asks reveals more Wii U secrets and magic

Nintendo Europe has posted up the latest installment of Iwata Asks. The feature where Satoru Iwata sits down with his team to chat about a new game or in this case new hardware. Yes, this Iwata Asks is all about the Wii U hardware. How it looks, how it runs and all the little things you never thought you wanted to know.

Iwata is joined by Genyo Takeda, Ko Shiota, Yasuhisa Kitano and Nobuyuki Akagi who are all on the R&D team at Nintendo in Japan. These are the guys who make the Wii U and other Nintendo consoles the way they are, obviously not just all four of them though. That would be impressive.

This first instalment of a Wii U focused Iwata Asks covers briefly the need for HD in the Wii U but also the desire to make a console that has low power consumption. This goal of low power consumption has apparently been a goal of Nintendo’s since the GameCube. To reduce power usage Nintendo put the GPU and the CPU of the Wii U on MCM or multi chip module. This means that the graphics and CPU of the Wii U are all on the one chip. Not only is this cheaper (for Nintendo) but also uses less power and there’s less latency between the two. Nintendo included some pictures of what the chips inside the Wii U look like as well as the mother board inside the system. There’s really not much to it.

The interview also goes in depth into how the Wii U is cooled and the troubles they had with all this extra power in keeping the system cool but also small and quiet. To that end the team put together this terrific looking transparent Wii U so you can see just how packed the system is inside and how the air flows through it.

If you want a transparent Wii U, don’t hold your breath. Even though Iwata himself says he wants one this is simple a test console. Boo!

The rest of the interview concentrates on the smaller issues with console and its hardware design. The sync button has been given a spot on the front of the console due to customer problems trying to figure out how to sync controllers and now the hatch of the front of the console folds inside. No more getting in the way! The hatch now has two USB ports on the front as well as the SD card slot.

There’s a lot more in this Iwata Asks then we’ve included here so if you’re interested in how the Wii U was built and how they came up with the ideas then did its well worth a read. The next interview should be ‘Iwata Asks: Wii U GamePad’ and that’s something that should be interesting to see. Maybe we’ll see a transparent GamePad?