I call BS on anyone that tries to label the 3DS as "last-gen" but the NGP not. Taking a loot at what we can compare between them (such as Metal Gear Solid on both) they both look about comparable: with graphical capabilities that land closest to the 360 and PS3 of any such devices out there. (since those consoles are respectively 4 and 5 years old by now, this is expectable)
Just because the 3DS isn't confirmed to have a quad-core CPU doesn't mean it's down-and-out: must I remind Sony fans that the PS3's CPU has only one core, too, yet still is vastly more potent than the competitions' CPUs? Not everything is clear-cut here. It's all about how the design works. Further, there's no solid confirmation of WHAT the 3DS' CPU is... All that's known is what the GPU is. (which on its own is impressive, and readily comparable to the SGX543 in the NGP)
Overall, I'd say that both handhelds look pretty comparable... And for the first time ever, yes, perhaps there's a credible threat to Nintendo's dominance. The PSP was rolled over almost 3:1, with Nintendo keeping a 73.7% market share. Its main problems involved poor targetting: it was too expensive a piece for the market, and hence never caught on as a portable gaming machine: it instead mostly was favored for its impressive homebrew capabilities. While a showcase to the device's power, it didn't exactly make it a market winner.
A closer matchup means that Nintendo will have some real company to deal with... So this should be exciting to watch; my prediction is that this might be the most hotly-contested and even 'bout since the SNES vs. Genesis fight of almost 20 years ago. And at that time, everyone was the winner there: that fight was what made gaming consoles start to truly "grow up." While Nintendo did eventually win, they had to entirely surrender their old iron-fisted regime over who could make what games, and cross-platform releases started to become the norm, benefiting everyone. I'm hoping this might do something similar, perhaps for download markets, homebrew, or perhaps both. (a true gaming ApStore, anyone?)
[citation][nom]dconnors[/nom]The same applies to the Wii and GameCube, in a sense.[/citation]
Give me a single source on the Wii's actual specs that is NOT a copy-paste of what IGN said back in 2005. (before the console was even finalized) As it turns out, Nintendo's managed to keep all specs under-wraps... But those of us who are knowledgeable enough about hardware and software engineering have been able to get a few clues... And they all indicate IGN's guess was wildly off. While the base core architecture of the Wii is an extension of the GameCube's, the same can be said that a Core i7 is just an extension of the Pentium III.
Overall capabilities-wise, the Wii lags in two main respects: maximum display resolution and memory quantity. The former is a hard limit: it can't go above 1MB for a frame buffer, as unlike the 360 and PS3 (and many other consoles, including even the N64, DS, PSP, and Dreamcast) it has a fixed frame buffer, and can't simply allocate memory at will to it. However, it's not as huge as is made out to be: it may be limited to 720x480 or so, but the Xbox 360 doesn't actually do 720p most of the time: most top-shelf titles actually run at something like 576p, (1024x576) 64% the screen area of true 720p; 480p is 69.4% the size of 576p, meaning the 360's resolution tends to be actually closer to the Wii's than the PS3's in these games.
The latter weakness is in total memory, one of the handful of figures that could be accurately measured by simply looking in the case: a copy of the GameCube's original memory setup (27MB) was found packed into one of the chips, and there's a further single RAM chip on-board: examination of it reveals that it's entirely identical to the graphics RAM in the PS3, (which has four such chips) which means it's 64MB, and clocked to the same 1400 MHz as in the PS3. This is a distinct shortage, but in both capacity and bandwidth, once you note the reduced demands due to cut resolution, as well as the bandwidth gains due to the multi-part system, (which comes at the expense of ease of programming) you wind up with a RAM supply that, while still inferior to the PS3 or 360's, is still VASTLY more superior than, say, the PS3's. (to compare total bandwidth of a few systems, the original Xbox topped at 6.4GB/sec, the Wii 26.3GB/sec, the 360 22.4GB/sec, the PS3 35.2GB/sec) Overall, one can't describe the Wii as a "modified GameCube," rather, if you wanted to make a comparison on that lines, it'd be better to describe the Wii as "a GameCube plus an Xbox."
Worse yet is your idea that the GameCube was somehow behind on the 6th generation. Sure, it didn't match up to the Xbox, but then again, nothing did: it was the (black) elephant in the room that era: the PS2 didn't match it, and if anything, it was the DreamCast, with its specs that curiously scream "I need to beat the N64," that was the laggard of the 6th generation.