If Sony and Microsoft practice black magic, Nintendo practices chaos magic . While the others chase teraflops, Nintendo chases .
Engineers call this the "fixed target paradox." If you build a console that is powerful by today’s standards, it will be laughably weak by the time the holiday season arrives four years later. But if you aim too high, you produce a $900 brick that no one can afford. The art lies in the sweet spot —choosing a GPU architecture that doesn't exist yet, a memory standard still in draft, and a manufacturing process (e.g., 3nm or 5nm) that has a 40% yield rate at launch. The Black Art of Video Game Console Design