When the NES Classic Edition launches on November 11 for $59.99, it’ll pack 30 NES games. Those games are the only games the system will support, as Nintendo has stated that the NES Classic can’t be expanded.
Some press outlets have torn down the miniature console to discover what’s within. Those teardowns reveal hardware that’s actually more powerful than what Nintendo crammed into the Wii and Nintendo 3DS.
Nintendo Enthusiast ran down the specs for each system.
NES Classic
- SoC: Allwinner R16 (4x Cortex A7, Mali400MP2 GPU)
- RAM: Hynix (256MB DDR3)
- Flash: Spansion 512MB NAND
- PMU: AXP223
Nintendo 3DS
- CPU: Dual-Core ARM11 MPCore, single-core ARM0 (804 MHz ARM11 MPCore quad-core + extra weaker single-core in New 3DS)
- RAM: 128MB FCRAM, 6MB VRAM (256MB, 10MB VRAM in New 3DS)
- GPU: DMP PICA200 GPU (804 MHz DMP PICA200 in New 3DS)
Wii
- CPU: IBM PowerPC “Broadway” 729MHz
- RAM: 88MB, 24MB MoSys 1T-SRAM, 324 MHz, 2.7GB/s bandwidth
- GPU: ATI “Hollywood” 243 MHz
Why would the NES Classic be more powerful than the Wii and 3DS?
It’s as funny as it is strange, sure, but there’s likely a good reason for the disparity in power. Technology has moved fast enough in the years since the release of these two consoles that it would actually be more expensive to design the NES Classic Edition with lesser hardware.
That is, Nintendo went with a chipset that was inexpensive to mass produce. It just so happens that the hardware is more powerful than it was back in 2011 for the 3DS and 2006 for the Wii.
All that power reserved exclusively for running old NES games. I want one of these things.
