Four Million Nintendo Wii by Year End – Company

by Anton Shilov
11/29/2006 | 02:49 PM

Nintendo Corp. a leading producer of game consoles, said on Wednesday that it was on track to sell four million Nintendo Wii game consoles by the end of the year. The company said that the only obstacle to sell more units than the planned amount of the gaming machines was the manufacturing capabilities, even though, the company named no manufacturing constraints.

“All systems are go for reaching the 4-million target we have in our financials by December 31. We will sell everything we make so now it’s simply a manufacturing thing,” said Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime at the Reuters media summit in New York.

Nintendo has already said that it had already shipped 600 thousand Nintendo Wii units in the Americas alone and with the December launch of the game console in Europe the company does seem to be on track with its shipments targets. Currently the firm hopes to sell two million of Wii game consoles in the Americas by the end of the year.

Nintendo’s Wii game console was designed so that to be affordable, widely available, yet, provide to exciting game-play not only to the hardcore games, but also for those, who play occasionally. At a relatively low price-point of the Wii, customers are more than likely to obtain the console that has so much hype around itself.

Every Wii system includes the five-game Wii Sports software that allows users to play using the motion-sensitive game controller, something not available previously.

Nintendo Wii console features IBM’s custom PowerPC architecture-based microprocessor named Broadway clocked at 729MHz and code-named Hollywood chip with built-in graphics core, DSP and I/O features from ATI that operates at 243MHz, earlier reports suggested. Nintendo Wii uses 91MB of memory in total: 23MB of “main” 1T-SRAM, 64MB of “external” 1T-SRAM and 3MB texture buffer on the GPU. Nintendo’s Wii does not feature a hard disk drive, instead, it boasts with 512MB of flash memory, but the console will also have a card reader, which will allow installing more memory.