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The '''Wii''' is a home console released by Nintendo on November 19, 2006 (North America). It was mainly developed by [[BroadOn]], [[ATI|ATi]], [[NEC]], IBM, [[Nintendo European Research and Development|Nintendo IRD]] and [[NCL]]. It is the second iteration of Nintendo's PowerPC 750-based hardware platform that was used between 1997 and 2012, and the hardware architecture of the Wii was intentionally designed to be a natural iteration on the GameCube's hardware (and, to some extent, software as well) architecture .

The '''Wii''' is a home console released by Nintendo on November 19, 2006 (North America). It was mainly developed by [[BroadOn]], [[ATI|ATi]], [[NEC]], IBM, [[Nintendo iRD|Nintendo iRD]] and [[NCL]]. It is the second iteration of Nintendo's PowerPC 750-based hardware platform that was used between 1997 and 2012, and the hardware architecture of the Wii was intentionally designed to be a natural iteration on the GameCube's hardware (and, to some extent, software as well) architecture .

Design of the Wii (initially called "GameCube 2", then "New Nintendo GameCube" and finally codenamed "Revolution") started in mid-2003, with ATi (which had acquired ArtX, the company Nintendo contracted to develop the GameCube's GPU) being contracted to develop the "Hollywood" SoC containing the GPU, security coprocessor (the [[IOP]], more commonly known as Starlet), and various other system components. The IBM-provided CPU was a slight refresh of the GameCube "Flipper" CPU, with minor improvements, a CPU clock speed boost from 486 to 729 megahertz, a die shrink, and corrections of CPU errata found in the Flipper. The motion control technology used in the Wii Remote was internally developed by Nintendo in collaboration with Gyration, Inc. The Wii's development was quite rushed, with initial bringup taking a surprisingly long time (early developers had to use a "Revolution Emulator", with development of the Revolution SDK, a fork of the GameCube SDK, only beginning in March 2005, development of IOP OS beginning May 2005, the first devkits only going out in late 2005, and the main system UI only finished five days in advance of the console's worldwide release date) This required early units (mostly used in kiosks) to be manually updated with a [[Wii Startup Disc]].

Design of the Wii (initially called "GameCube 2", then "New Nintendo GameCube" and finally codenamed "Revolution") started in mid-2003, with ATi (which had acquired ArtX, the company Nintendo contracted to develop the GameCube's GPU) being contracted to develop the "Hollywood" SoC containing the GPU, security coprocessor (the [[IOP]], more commonly known as Starlet), and various other system components. The IBM-provided CPU was a slight refresh of the GameCube "Flipper" CPU, with minor improvements, a CPU clock speed boost from 486 to 729 megahertz, a die shrink, and corrections of CPU errata found in the Flipper. The motion control technology used in the Wii Remote was internally developed by Nintendo in collaboration with Gyration, Inc. The Wii's development was quite rushed, with initial bringup taking a surprisingly long time (early developers had to use a "Revolution Emulator", with development of the Revolution SDK, a fork of the GameCube SDK, only beginning in March 2005, development of IOP OS beginning May 2005, the first devkits only going out in late 2005, and the main system UI only finished five days in advance of the console's worldwide release date) This required early units (mostly used in kiosks) to be manually updated with a [[Wii Startup Disc]].