REDMOND, Wash. — Nintendo’s soon-to-be-released Wii video game console is getting raves from reviewers and others who have gotten an early peek.

The Wii (pronounced wee) sports an innovative controller: To hit a tennis ball, you swing it like a racket; to drive an SUV over treacherous terrain, you twist it like a steering wheel; to shoot a duck, you point it like a pistol. Getting consumers to try it — and jump-start Nintendo’s (NTDOY) ambitious plan to trump Microsoft’s (MSFT) Xbox 360 and Sony’s (SNE) PlayStation 3 — falls to Reginald Fils-Aime, 45, Nintendo of America’s new president and chief operating officer.
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The Wii Hardware

- Nintendo Wii’s ‘Broadway’ CPU operates at 729MHZ with a maximum bandwith of 1.9gbyte/sec.
- Nintendo Wii’s ‘HollyWood’ GPU is clocked at 243MHZ, the internal memory of it includes 3mb of embedded graphics memory and 24megabytes of high speed main memory.
- 64megabytes of GDDR3 (MEM2) as the external main memory. Just like the internal memory, it can be accessed from the CPU and GPU with a maximum bandwidth of 4gbytes/sec and can also store programs in the MEM2.
- The GPU of the Wii is identical to the GC’s but it is on average 1.5X faster.

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