Wii will pass 50M milestone

IBM has announced shipment of its 50 milllionth Broadway CPU for Nintendo's Wii console.

IBM's Broadway is a 90nm SOI part, clocked at 729MHz and designed especially for the Wii. The announcement comes expectedly, only days after ATI revealed it has shipped 50 million Holywood GPUs for the popular console.

Obviously we can expect Nintendo's announcement of shipping 50 million Wii consoles in a few weeks, but you sholdn't hope for a price cut any time soon. Over the past two and a half years, the console's price has not been dropped, and recently Nintendo decided to jack up the price for the British market, thanks to the weak pound.

Last week AMD announced it has shipped the 50 millionth ATI Holywood GPU for Nintendo's Wii console. This makes Hollywood the best selling AMD console GPU, significantly surpassing previous console GPU shipments.

Nintendo has used ATI chips on a number of its products over the past decade, but the Wii's success has surpassed them all. Since its introduction in Nobember 2006, close to 50 million units have been shipped worldwide, with 44.96 million units shipped by December 31 2008.

On average, almost 60,000 Wii consoles were sold each day over the past two and a half years, which is truly a mind boggling figure.